No subtext. No social commentary. This B-movie is not trying to say anything other than "chimpanzees can be terrifying", and that is exactly why it works.
You weren't alone if you walked out of Jordan Peele’s science fiction horror Nope wishing it was less about wibbly wobbly UFOs and more about Gordy, the sitcom chimpanzee who snaps and goes on a rampage in a TV studio. For many viewers, Gordy’s brief appearance was the most terrifying and memorable part of the film. Now someone has gone and made an entire movie built around that idea, and it fully commits. The universe delivers.
Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns to her family home in Hawaii, bringing along her best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Hannah (Jessica Alexander), her frenemy and romantic rival. There they reunite with Lucy’s widower father Adam, a successful deaf author portrayed by Academy Award winner Troy Kotsur, her sister Erin (Gia Hunter), and Nick (Benjamin Cheng), who completes the Lucy/Hannah love triangle. And of course there is Ben, a highly intelligent chimpanzee who was part of a research project run by Lucy’s late mother, a linguistics professor. When Adam is called away for the weekend, the young group are left alone with Ben, who has suddenly started acting very strangely.
For years, chimpanzees have been framed on screen as clowns, used for comic relief, dressed up like humans to sell tea. That image collapses quickly once you hear the real-world stories of captive chimps turning on humans, revealing just how devastatingly strong and violent they can be. They bite, they pull, they pound. Far from harmless, chimpanzees are genuinely dangerous animals in certain situations. That makes them an ideal subject for a horror film.
Ben is not a villain by choice. Like the title character of another animal attack classic, Cujo, he has been infected with rabies. The virus transforms this once gentle and curious ape into a psychotic, vicious killer. If you pause to think about it for too long, the situation is deeply upsetting, but the film has no interest in lingering there. A line of dialogue neatly declares "that’s not Ben anymore", allowing the audience to stop feeling conflicted and start treating him as a Jason Voorhees-style force of destruction. Primate has no interest in nuance or sentimental complexity. It knows exactly what kind of movie it is, and it never pretends otherwise.
The film makes a slightly odd decision to open with a flash-forward, showing a particularly nasty and gory sequence involving a local veterinarian. Placed at the top to reassure the audience that the mayhem is coming while the characters and relationships are established, one can’t help but think it would have landed harder if it had unfolded chronologically. Once things escalate, however, the film shows a strong grasp of tension and payoff. Rabies-induced hydrophobia traps the group in a swimming pool while Ben stalks them from the edges. A bite on Lucy’s kid sister introduces a ticking clock as the irreversible and fatal effects of the virus begin to loom. Simple ideas deployed with confidence, as we’ve seen with shark horror 47 Metres Down and the surprisingly good The Strangers: Prey at Night, genre director Johannes Roberts knows exactly what he’s doing here.
One of the smartest decisions is making Ben a largely practical effect. He is a man in a chimpanzee suit, with some CGI enhancement, but the cast are reacting to a physical presence. CGI chimpanzees have their place, be it leading revolutions or playing Robbie Williams, but it’s not here. That tangibility comes through in the performances and gives the film a weight it would not have had with a fully digital creature.
Primate is the definition of high-concept horror with low-brow ambitions, and it executes that mission extremely well. It is nasty, knowingly silly, and entirely comfortable with its own limitations. If you need a night off from prestige cinema, this is exactly the kind of film that earns it.
