Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round is directed by Aidan Leary and the cast includes Michael Gilio.
TL;DR: A twisted children’s TV show slowly collapses into a story about memory loss, identity, and things going very wrong behind the scenes - it’s worth watching if you like unsettling ideas and strong performances, but it drags in places and works better in bursts than as a full-length sit down.
A Children’s Show That Starts Off Too Cheerful To Trust
James “Jimbo” Jensen, played by Michael Gilio, hosts a bright, overly friendly children’s program, where he sings, he talks directly to camera, and he hangs out with puppets who are supposed to teach lessons about kindness and imagination, with one of those puppets being a monkey with human hands.
At first, everything runs like a slightly exaggerated version of something you’d half remember from childhood - the colours are loud, the music is overly cheerful, and Jimbo acts like nothing outside that studio exists, which already makes the whole thing a bit uncomfortable, because there’s no real sense of a world beyond the set, just this closed loop of smiles and puppets and some forced cheer.
And then the cracks start showing - memory loss, missing pieces, and things not adding up - and the story shifts once Jimbo starts losing his grip on what’s real and what isn’t, as he begins forgetting parts of his own life, which starts to spread through everything he does.
The film also has this running idea that memory is fragile, and the film keeps pushing Jimbo into situations where he’s forced to confront gaps he can’t explain, and a lot of it comes through small details, like objects showing up that shouldn’t matter but clearly do, or people reacting to him like they’ve met him in a completely different life.
The actual mystery isn’t hard to figure out early, either, as the film drops enough clues that the main direction becomes pretty clear before it’s ready to confirm anything, but that's beside the point, as Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round is all about watching someone slowly lose their footing while still trying to smile through it.
Michael Gilio gives a performance playing Jimbo that feels very physical in a way that stands out immediately - the way he moves around the set, the way he interacts with puppets like they are real coworkers, even the timing of his jokes, it all feels carefully controlled at first, before that control starts slipping.
What works best though is how he doesn’t switch into some obvious breakdown mode, it’s more like small interruptions in the performance, and there’s a section where he creates a puppet out of random objects and plays it off like a normal segment, which is both funny and uncomfortable at the same time.
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Puppets and Practical Effects
Puppets are always creepy to me, and in Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, it's no different, as they actively push the discomfort, where the monkey puppet, especially, stands out, I mean, human hands on something that should not have human hands is already doing most of the psychological damage.
There are also moments where the film shifts between cute and disturbing in a way that doesn’t really give you time to settle, because one second it’s a cheerful children’s segment, the next something is slightly off, then suddenly it’s fully off, with no slow warning, just a hard shift.
Some of the practical effects do land really well too, especially when the show starts breaking down into something more violent, where nothing overdone, and nothing is trying to compete with bigger horror films, but it's enough to make the cheerful setting start to rot in a visible way.
But, a few of the ideas are stronger than the execution at times, and you can tell where the film is stretching itself thin trying to keep the momentum going, because I think the main problem with the film is that while it has enough material for a really strong short, maybe even a series of short episodes, it all just feels stretched out into a full feature, where it repeats itself a bit.
Memory
Even with its pacing issues, there’s still something interesting going on underneath all of this, where the film leans heavily into the idea of childhood memory and how unreliable it becomes over time featuring a slightly unsettling one.
Jimbo isn’t just losing memories, he’s losing his ability to tell what version of himself is real, so the show becomes a kind of holding space for that confusion, even when it starts breaking apart, and there’s also something uncomfortable about how the puppets and characters behave like they’re part of a system that doesn’t care whether Jimbo understands what’s happening or not, where he’s trying to make sense of it, but the environment refuses to give him anything solid back, so while it doesn’t always land cleanly, when it does, it's good enough.
Final Thoughts
Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round stays interesting enough more because of its lead performance and visual commitment than its storytelling structure, as while it has strong moments, it also runs longer than it needs to
Still, there’s enough here to make it worth sitting through once, especially if you like horror that builds its discomfort out of familiar childhood images slowly falling apart, and I’m glad I watched it but don’t really need to revisit it anytime soon, either.