The Monkey isn't even out yet, but Tatiana Maslany's second collaboration with its director Osgood Perkins is already kicking off its promotional run. The cryptic first teaser for Keeper, the She-Hulk star's next horror movie, is reportedly being rolled out as a post-credits scene for the Longlegs helmer's latest – and according to Maslany, it's entirely different to any of the filmmaker's previous works.
"I think what's exciting about Oz's work, and why I'm so drawn to it, is that it never does the thing you're expecting. These three movies that have just come or, you know, coming out in such a short span of time are all so incredibly different," she tells GamesRadar+, referencing Longlegs, The Monkey, and Keeper. "The size of them is different, the tone is different, the story is very different. But there are themes that recur in terms of, like, inherited trauma and the unknowability of death, and facing death in incomprehensible ways.
"I mean, I'm curious to see it. I still haven't seen it," Maslany laughs. "But I know that filming it was fun. Even though it has this heavy, heavy tone, there's always a little mischief in [Oz's] movies."
The details of Keeper's plot are being kept somewhat of a mystery for now, though we do know that it'll be a two-hander between Maslany and Rossif Sutherland. It's also been revealed that the pair will play a couple, Liz and Malcolm, who travel up to a remote cabin one weekend to celebrate their anniversary. When Malcolm is unexpectedly called into work, though, and Liz is left all alone, she encounters a sinister evil hiding out in the rental.
"[It] was my first kind of introduction to [Oz], in terms of our relationship working together. I just felt so in such good hands with him; his dexterity with tone was exciting to me," Maslany says of shooting. "He just has such a bizarre way of looking at the world and has collected a wonderful crew of people to make these movies with, who have that same dexterity. I was just excited to go on whatever ride he wanted to go on with me. The Monkey script was so funny and bonkers and in line with other movies that I really love, like Shaun of the Dead and stuff like that. So it was exciting to me to get to step into it, and the character was awesome – so well-written and so different to anything I'd played before."
Also starring Halloween Ends' Rohan Campbell, Sweet Tooth's Christian Convery, and The White Lotus's Theo James, The Monkey sees twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn forced to patch up their rocky relationship and set out on a mission of revenge, after the cursed toy from their childhood starts violently offing everyone they come into contact with again.
"Oz always talked about Lois as being the heart of the movie, in the sense of this great, unthinkable loss sort of marring the rest of your life – the senselessness of it, and the unfairness of death and the incomprehensibility of it," says Maslany of her character. "Lois has this sense of wonder and humor when it comes to death that I think her kids don't right away – we all learn these lessons as we experience them. Oz has a huge heart, and I think, you know, he'd never want to make something that doesn't have some kind of beating heart to it."
The Monkey has it all; gore, laughs, and a thought-provoking undercurrent about enjoying life while you can – because you never know when it's going to be snuffed out. "The writing in the script was so kind of buoyant and playful that it didn't feel to me that it needed any improv. From my point of view, anyway, I know a lot of other characters did a lot of improv, but there was something so clean to the way that [Lois] was written that I really wanted to honor," Maslany notes. "And when it comes to balancing the light and dark, death is so unfathomable that her survival method is just to dance. It's to say it plainly. It's to face it, to stare at it and, you know, she's had a lot of shitty things happen to her, so I think he's just like, 'I gotta keep going'.
The Monkey releases on February 21, while Keeper is expected on October 3. For more, check out our picks of the most exciting upcoming horror movies heading our way.
