• Alexander Balfanz
• Apr 12, 2024 (DialyCal.org)

“The pain will leave as soon as it has finished teaching you.”

Grade: 4.5/5.0

The second best sequence in “Monkey Man” begins with bleach-laced cocaine and ends with an involuntary baptism through helicopter gunfire. It’s just ten minutes from Point A to Point B, but it feels like a surreal eternity. This is then followed by the film’s first best sequence, where Dev Patel gets taught how to fight by a community of gender nonconforming political dissidents. You — yes you, the reader — must see this movie.

The former stretch — cocaine to bullets — is, for lack of a perfect descriptor, straight-up deranged. Patel’s character “Kid” circumvents sex traffickers through seedy side streets, dodging everyone from lawless cops to low-level pimps. Meanwhile, the camera chases after him like a bat out of hell. Sometimes we see Patel from a worm’s eye view, as if we’re crawling behind him; other times we quickly take his viewpoint right before he fires off some unpredictable stunt, landing him back in front of the lens. Even in some static shots, the picture vibrates like an unspooling roll of film.

The wobbly camerawork will certainly put some viewers off, but “Monkey Man” makes a far more compelling case for shaky cam than cheap Bourne-alikes. Its chaotic visual style isn’t just a way to mask poor fight choreography or cheap effects — it zaps verve into the film like a defibrillator. And yes, while it does make the moment-to-moment movement of fights hard to follow, “Monkey Man” more than makes up for it with some inspired carnage. We don’t need to understand the intricacies of brawls when moves like “guy bites a knife in his mouth, stabs other guy” or “bathroom fish tank explodes” are on the table.

The stretch right after this — the aforementioned training montage — is somehow just as frenetic, despite lacking much of the carnage. It’s hard to explain why to those who haven’t seen “Monkey Man,” but the image of a rice bag bursting while a tabla solo plays in the background is, in context, possibly one of the best things ever put to film. And yet it still has some stiff competition with another scene from the same segment, one in which Patel gets high on hallucinogens and imagines tearing his chest open.

So, is that what the hype is all about? Action so great it transcends pretty much everything else? Not exactly. “Monkey Man” opens with a story about a deity trying to eat the Sun. Dev Patel — writer, director, producer and star of “Monkey Man” — is trying to do just that with this film. He’s trying to cram the might of the Sun into one movie and devour it whole. So yes, there’s a lot more.

The laundry list of themes covered over the course of the film includes, but is not limited to: religion, class, gender, violence, nationalism, revenge and the idea of human purpose. “Monkey Man” has a lot to say about each of these, but its message is far from didactic. It’s so far from didactic, actually, that there’s a chance not even Dev Patel knows what the film is trying to “say.” It’s only clear that his movie is saying it loudly. 

However, because the film operates on such a purely emotional level, it somehow pulls this chaos off. Each theme is linked in ways that might mean nothing but still make a twisted kind of sense. For example, the prominence of female prostitution in the narrative can be seen as a commentary on the prevalence of violence towards women, which can connect to the backstory of Kid’s mother, which is what gives Kid a cause to fight for, which is a notion explained to him by the hijra worshippers of Ardhanarishvara, who obviously connect to the film’s hefty religious themes, which are first introduced when a crowd of wrestling fans boo Christianity …

Untangling the web of meaning in “Monkey Man” feels just as trippy as watching the movie itself. Every facet relies on instinctual logic, on some vision known only to Dev Patel. When people saw Picasso paint for the first time, maybe they thought he was crazy, too.

*RHS stands for Releasing the Hidden Splsndour, a Prosperos class about resolving emotional blockages through self-observation and the understanding of our true identity as Consciousness. More info about RHS can be found here: https://www.theprosperos.org/teaching