In Monkey Man, Dev Patel tries to throw himself out of a window. Stabbed to a bloody mess in the bathroom of a high-rise hotel, he has temporarily escaped his attackers, who remain in hot pursuit. The best escape route is through a window, and so he takes a beat to consider his options, then flings himself at it. His body hits glass with a thud. It’s one of several flashes in the film of Patel’s self-deprecating humour.
The actor co-wrote, directed and produced the film, an ambitious, high-octane revenge thriller set in the fictional Indian city of Yatana. Patel has come a long way from his breakout role as Anwar, the goofy Muslim kid on Skins. In recent years, his wit and offbeat sensibility has played off his handsomeness: he has gelled well with film-makers including Armando Iannucci (The Personal History of David Copperfield), David Lowery (The Green Knight) and Wes Anderson (The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar). It’s interesting then, that for his own directorial debut, Patel has leaned in to genre. Clearly, he’s studied the texture, choreography and pacing of martial arts movies with nerdy attention to detail.
The film follows a downtrodden young man out to avenge the death of his mother. Kid (Patel) infiltrates a posh hotel, ascending from pot-washer to waiter, serving the city’s elite. Among them is Rana Singh (Sikandar Kher), a corrupt police officer with a connection to Kid’s mother. Kid is enraged by the mere sight of him, seeking justice with righteous fists, and a sparkly high heel. (I giggled at Patel beating the bad guy with the equivalent of a slipper or chappal.)
Blood-spurting, bone-crunching violence is shot at messy close range, relying on sheer kinetic energy as opposed to elegant blocking and staging. Mostly though, it works. The film is a riot that gleefully depicts Patel shopping for a gun (“You like John Wick?” jokes the man who sells it to him), scaling a chicken-wire fence and biting chunks out of an axe-wielder’s face.
Patel layers social and political commentary with the action sequences: the hotel functions as a crude but effective metaphor for the toxic hierarchies that govern Indian society. What really makes Kid angry is the caste system that empowers sectarian violence, forced displacement, inequality and daily humiliations – factors that contributed to his mother’s murder.
The camera weaves frenetically through the city’s bustling slums, plummeting to street level from the top of gleaming skyscrapers. His boss, Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar), speaks in Hindi but swears in English. Also hovering over the film is the presence of Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), a religious leader with hordes of followers, who endorses the country’s incumbent (and Hindu nationalist) political party.
In a viral post on X, it was pointed out that an updated trailer for Monkey Man “shows that they’ve changed the colours of the evil political party from saffron (Hindu nationalist BJP) to red (Communist Party)”. It’s hard not to speculate about other aspects of the film that might have been softened to temper criticism about its real-world resonances.
Still, I don’t imagine that audiences in the West and across the diaspora will interpret that tweak literally. The film’s critique of an extremely popular dictator who has managed to weaponise Hinduism is not exactly subtle. Part way through the film, Kid is taken in by the hijra, a community of transgender women who have been shunned by society. News footage that appears in the background of the film draws attention to violence against India’s trans people and Muslims, and the international leaders who turn a blind eye.
But Patel, who is British-Gujarati and was raised as a Hindu, is careful not to disavow religion completely. His frame narrative draws parallels between Kid’s summoning of strength and the Hindu myth of Hanuman. When Kid was a child, his mother told him of a monkey stripped of his powers by the cruel gods, who reclaims them to help rescue the goddess Sita.
Patel likely wants to ensure the film will be screened in India, whose Central Board of Film Certification is notoriously strict. In 2023, the Washington Post reported on the pressure put on Indian creators, especially those that have relationships with streamers such as Netflix and Amazon, to remove any “reference to religion that might offend the Hindu right wing or the BJP”.
It’s telling that Monkey Man was destined for a streaming debut on Netflix before Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions acquired it with the intention of a cinema release. The film is brimming with ideas, and Patel’s ambition is deserving of a big screen.
“Monkey Man” is in cinemas now
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This article appears in the 03 Apr 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Fragile Crown