Primate – Review

There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes from no-frills January slasher films. Stripped of prestige aspirations and any lingering awards-season self-importance, these early-year genre entries often serve up pure, bloody catharsis – fast, nasty, and just coherent enough to make you root for whoever’s about to get mauled next, and Primate fits squarely into that tradition. 

Directed by Johannes Roberts, who previously sent Mandy Moore into shark-infested waters in 2017’s 47 Meters Down and tackled 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City with mixed results, Primate is 89 minutes of scream-and-splat mayhem led by a chimpanzee on a warpath. It knows exactly what it is and never tries to be more, just a movie about stupid humans getting eviscerated by a very angry ape. If that sentence alone doesn’t scare you off, then chances are that you’ll find something to enjoy.

Roberts has never been a subtle filmmaker, and Primate doesn’t pretend otherwise. His sensibilities lean toward the physical, the guttural, the primal (pun very much intended) and it tracks that his influences include both creature features and claustrophobic thrillers, including Stephen King’s Cujo (1981), which he’s openly cited as a key inspiration. But where Cujo carved out space for sentiment and psychological fear, Primate delights in excess because there’s no attempt to empathise with its beast or elevate the premise beyond what’s promised – an apex predator with opposable thumbs and a grudge. 

Working with longtime collaborator Ernest Riera (Nowhere), Roberts keeps the script lean and the pacing merciless. The setup is horror-familiar as Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah, Dexter: New Blood), freshly finished with her freshman year, invites her childhood best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant, My Fault: London) to her family’s cliffside estate in Hawaii. The house belongs to her father Adam (Troy Kotsur, CODA), a successful, hearing-impaired novelist who lives surrounded by dense rainforest and high-end isolation. Raised alongside her younger sister Ellie (Gia Hunter, Sherlock & Daughter), both sisters see the titular primate Ben (brought to life by movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba) as a family member since their mother, a linguist who specialised in human-primate communication, once spearheaded the research that led to Ben living among them.

Complications start well before any blood is shed as Kate brings along a wildcard – Hannah (Jessica Alexander, The Little Mermaid), the kind of guest who makes herself too comfortable too fast. Her flirtation with Kate’s brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng) immediately throws Lucy off, given her quiet pining for him. The group dynamics bubble with tension, but none of it matters for long as Ben’s breakdown begins with a mongoose bite and early signs, like odd behaviour and escalating aggression are dismissed until it’s far too late, and romance and rivalry are reduced to background noise because this ape movie doesn’t have time for any monkey business.

The script may lean into genre staples yet somehow, those recognisable beats become staging grounds for chaos, a kind of narrative scaffolding built just sturdy enough to support the weight of full-throttle carnage. Blood spills early and often, and each kill arrives with a mix of sadism and slapstick. Victims are dispatched in increasingly grotesque ways, with one poor soul quite literally dropped out of the frame, while another has his jaw unhinged in a scene so absurdly brutal, it earns a laugh before the wince kicks in. Party bros and hapless teens are punished, humiliated, and dismantled with the kind of overkill that feels pulled from the unrated cut of a particularly gnarly slasher. 

It’s this commitment to relentless, inventive, sometimes gleefully mean-spirited carnage that makes Primate such a viciously entertaining crowd-pleaser, especially for pulp horror fans with a high tolerance and a dark sense of humour. There’s also an unnerving intelligence to the chaos because while Ben may be infected, he’s not mindless. Visual effects help sell this point, transforming the CG chimpanzee into a vessel of barely contained rage – his face becoming increasingly distorted as the virus sinks deeper into his brain. At one point, Ben uses a zoo communication device to smash out a single chilling word –  “DEAD”, eyes locked on the terrified children in a nearby pool. There’s no redemption arc here, no sympathetic origin story, just a clever, calculating predator who seems to enjoy the game. 

And amid all the carnage and genre theatrics, the film delivers one of its most effective sequences through total silence. Kotsur, the Oscar-winning actor cast in a role originally written for a hearing character, turns what could have been a token inclusion into the film’s most suspenseful stretch. In one standout moment, Ben creeps into the house, visible only to Kotsur’s daughter and the audience, while the sound design drops out entirely. It’s cruel, expertly drawn-out tension, executed with the same sense of gleeful malice that permeates the rest of the film but with an added pulse of genuine dread.

But for all its creative flourishes, Primate backs itself into a corner… literally. Roberts’ original conceit, trapping characters in one location as Ben prowls around, eventually forces the script into contortions to keep things moving. Characters wander off with paper-thin reasons, have screaming matches conducted within earshot of a bloodthirsty animal, and trip over each other in ways that stretch audience patience. These choices often serve no purpose other than to tee up the next grisly death and while it’s not unexpected in a creature feature, there comes a point where you wonder if anyone involved even tried to survive. Sometimes it feels like this film takes its violence very seriously, and its characters not at all.

Yes, the film is thin and it rushes in its scramble toward the next gory set-piece. Calling Primate smart would be like complimenting a sledgehammer for subtlety, but none of that matters when the film’s true objective is to lobotomize its audience with a steady stream of face-ripping chaos. And somewhere deep inside, we all want to see what it looks like when a chimp rips someone’s jaw clean off.

Natalie

Natalie is a big fan of anything related to movies, TV shows, and anime — you name it. When she’s not reading or being a dedicated cinephile, she’s probably playing gacha and tabletop games, or daydreaming of Caleb from Love and Deepspace.