The 5th Monkey

Plot

Cunda (Kingsley) lives deep in the Brazilian rainforest and is intent on making enough money so he can marry a widow in his village. However, his trade - capturing snakes for scientists - pays very little money, and he's in direct competition with other suitors.

One day, Cunda is bitten by a snake, and he crawls to the river to recover. While going through the agonizing recovery, he has an hallucination of four chimpanzees sitting in the river. Recovered, he returns home and finds the four chimpanzees waiting for him, and his efforts to shoo them away fail. Knowing that chimpanzees are not native to Brazil, he decides that they are a kind of supernatural gift for him. Believing this, he decides to take them to "the city" to sell them.

The journey isn't easy from the start; he discovers that he can't tie them on a rope and drag them, and the only way is to coax them. They stumble into a gold-panning camp, where Cunda is forced to work in order to pay off an old debt. When one of the monkeys is taken as payment, Cunda must figure how to retrieve the monkey and escape. Later, he, the monkeys and the adults of a village are kidnapped by mercenaries. Cunda and the monkeys escape, along with a village woman who refuses to leave his side. Arriving at a small town, a confusing sequence results in one of the monkeys disappearing, and Cunda becoming the servant of the local rich woman who has taken it upon herself to take care of the monkeys. Cunda now has to solve these two problems, and deal with the fact of the village woman's attraction to him plus his growing fondness of the monkeys.

Cast