The Monkey star explains the big difference between her character's death and the horror movie's more zany kills: "This had to break your heart instead of make you laugh"

Warning! This article contains spoilers for The Monkey. If you've yet to watch the movie and don't want to know anything that happens, turn back now!

Everybody dies. A fact of life, naturally, but also the tagline for Osgood Perkins' new horror-comedy The Monkey, which sees Theo James' twin brothers try to stop a sinister simian from violently offing everyone in their proximity.

Given its premise, it's hardly a shock that most of the film's characters don't make it to the end credits, but some deaths are more impactful to the plot than others': like Lois's, Hal and Bill's mother who meets her maker after the former turns the titular toy's key and wishes for it to kill his snide sibling. (If there's one thing to be certain of the monkey's murderous ways is that "it doesn't take requests").

In a new interview with GamesRadar+, Tatiana Maslany, who plays Lois, recalls watching the scenes she's not in (of which there are many) for the first time and how the film's shifts dramatically between her '90s-set opener and its modern-day section. "The two parts of the movie feel quite different, yeah," she notes. "It's sort of like that great thing that that movie Barbarian did, where it was like, 'Oh, we're in a whole different thing' suddenly.

"That's definitely how I experienced it, watching like an audience member. It was so fun to see this other side; the consequences of their childhood, the ways that they have stayed themselves and ossified. They're stuck even though they're adult men at this point. Something happening and, you know, them not being able to get past that is interesting," Maslany continues.

"It's like the wonderful trope of, like, 'the buried thing is gonna emerge', you know? The thing that you push down is only come forward 1,000% stronger. It's the lesson of Lois; of facing it and accepting it and there's nothing you can do – the thing that they struggle for."

Lois isn't the only one Hal and Bill (played by Sweet Tooth's Christian Convery as youngsters, before James takes over) loses in The Monkey. First, their beloved babysitter Annie gets decapitated at a teppanyaki restaurant, then, after Lois dies and they go to live with their aunt and uncle, the latter, Chip (Perkins himself) gets trampled to death by wild horses. Aunt Ida (Sarah Levy) bites the dust a good couple of decades later, when the monkey reemerges and she accidentally sets herself on fire before stepping into a flower pot and running headfirst into the sharp end of a 'For Sale' sign. Ouch.

"Oh my god. Her run-on sentence of a death? It's like a novel, it's so good," laughs Maslany, when we ask her whether she was jealous of everyone's zany kills when Lois simply collapses. "She does so much with no words in this movie. Like, she's so physically adept. She's just incredible. No, it was really fun to watch those [deaths] but, definitely, when we shot the death scene for Lois – we shot it a couple times – it had such a different feeling. We were all like, 'This has to break your heart instead of make you laugh.'"

The Monkey is in cinemas now. For more, check out our picks of the most exciting upcoming horror movies heading our way.