Primate tells us what it’s all about in its opening moments – a chimp mad with rabies bent on killing the people who raised it. And then, having told us how the trick plays out, puts the rabbit back in the hat and invites us to be amazed and awed all over again even though we know what’s coming. It is a testimony to the skill of director Johannes Roberts that he pulls off the feat, relying on a different mechanism to generate tension second time around.
We’re on Hawaii, the only state in America that’s rabies-free, we learn as the film goes along. Or was, anyway. And we’re in the house of a recently dead scientist where her deaf husband Adam (Troy Kotsur) still looks after Ben, the chimp his wife had taught to communicate using sign language.
Home for the summer is daughter Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), who’s brought slightly irritating friend Hannah (Jess Alexander) along for a bit of a jolly. Alongside Lucy’s old friend Kate (Victoria Wyant), Kate’s hot brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng), Lucy’s little sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and a couple of random horndogs (Charlie Mann, Tienne Simon) Hannah was flirting with on the flight over, this is the list of potential victims for Ben to get tucked into once he makes the transition from charming pet to homicidal primate.
The fact that Lucy’s mother was a scientist, and her father is a novelist, that her parents’ place is a vast open-plan place with a pool gives this a revenge-against-the-liberal-elites flavour to an extent, but more significant is the deafness of Adam, which is worked into the plot really well (Kotsur is deaf – you might remember him from CODA a few years ago).
Even more significant is that the director is really good at building tension, using silence to screw things to a sticking point, and he’s also good at the jump scares. The gore, when it comes, is also bloody and horrible. At least one person dies after having their jaw torn from their face while still alive.
The familiar “who dies first?” list is made early on. Surely not nice, generous Lucy or her blameless little sis? Not when there’s pushy Hannah to dispose of, her designs on hot Nick marking her out as being obviously for the chop, especially as nice Lucy has had her eye on Nick since for ever. What about the lads off the plane, chunks of surplus DNA as far as the narrative is concerned? Deaf Adam? Surely not.
The failure of anyone to pick up a baseball bat early on and bludgeon the insane creature to death seems like a plot weakness, but maybe everyone is in a state of shock once the creature starts rampaging. Similarly, the complete absence of any sort of strategy once the humans realise they’re all targets for annihilation seems a bit off. At one point the surviving humans are all huddled together in the middle of the swimming pool – rabies means animals fear water, apparently, or it does in this movie. There seems to be a lot of senseless inaction.
Roberts has been around for about 20 year, knocking out horror films that not many people have taken much notice of. He is strangely reticent to explore his creature’s most salient feature – he can communicate with humans and it’s really creepy when he does. But otherwise he’s on a roll with this one, its weaknesses in plot and psychological motivation seeming like genre nods, or is it vice versa? There’s a debt to Stephen King’s novel Cujo, which imagined a St Bernhard dog contracting rabies, and Roberts says he was also influenced by John Carpenter’s siege films. I thought there was a bit of Dario Argento’s sense of lush dread too.
They are a good cast, though any one of them could be swapped about for any of the others, except Wyant who is “the girl with the rack” that films like this seem to demand. Does a rack mean you get to live to the end, wearing the obligatory form-hugging T shirt?
By the end, a kind of operatic, gothic intensity of gore has been achieved, and Roberts has had his fun teasing us with genre conventions rigorously observed, except when they aren’t. Almost everyone is dead, including people who you might have hoped wouldn’t die. Roberts is good at that too.
Primate – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
