‘Primate’ Review: When the Monkey Goes Rogue

In the annual January lull for major releases in the United States, the market tends to fill up with thrillers, horror movies, and low-budget suspense films—projects with semi-anonymous casts and a no-frills commitment to genre mechanics. Of the lot, Primate is the one that goes most directly for the jugular. There’s no elaborate mythology, no dense backstory, no puzzle to solve. Director Johannes Roberts leans squarely into the tradition of B-movie cinema and delivers a stripped-down thriller whose entire premise can be summed up in a single question: what happens when a rabid chimpanzee gets trapped in a house with a group of teenagers? Some might argue Primate is more than that, but essentially, it isn’t. It’s about surviving an enraged monkey for just over 80 minutes. Full stop.

That simplicity is what makes it moderately effective. The film isn’t particularly original, nor does it attempt to reinvent the well-worn subgenre of “animals on the rampage,” but there’s a certain old-school charm to what it offers. For one thing, it has no interest in being politically correct—toward the animal, its handlers, or even some of the personal traits assigned to its characters. For another, it never loses sight of the task at hand. There’s a violent monkey on the loose, and there are people who would rather not become its next victim. That’s it. Everything else is just noise.

The plot follows the same back-to-basics approach. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and her two school friends (Victoria Wyant and Jessica Alexander) return from vacation to their home in Hawaii, where she lives with her deaf-mute father (Academy Award winner Troy Kotsur), her younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter), and—most importantly—Ben, a chimpanzee who has been meticulously trained, largely by Lucy’s mother, who recently passed away. Ben isn’t a pet so much as a full-fledged member of the household. There are also a few boys they meet on the plane, eager to party, and—made clear right from the start in an opening flash-forward—something is very wrong with Ben. He’s, shall we say, a little on edge.

That nervousness escalates into outright violence over the course of a single night, when the teens are left alone in the family’s sleek Hawaiian mansion, complete with swimming pools, scenic views, and, yes, a trained chimpanzee. The teenagers want to have fun, feel safe enough with Dad out of town and they trust the monkey will behave. Unfortunately, Ben has other plans. From that point on, the film becomes a matter of figuring out how to stay alive. A chain of conveniently contrived obstacles—the shape of the pool, the precise status of the phones, even the father’s disability—ensures the situation can’t be resolved too quickly. Primate throws in a few narrative knots along the way, but nothing too substantial.

There isn’t much more to dissect. Roberts isn’t particularly interested in deep characters, surprise twists, or, at least for now, launching a franchise. As a result, the virus that drives the chimp into a rabid frenzy has no mythical or symbolic dimension to it. What the director does care about is staging punchy horror and suspense sequences, usually involving the monkey doing unspeakable things to human faces, as if they were made of modelling clay. Beyond the often futile attempts to survive the chimp’s attacks, Primate doesn’t pretend to say much about anything. It’s a simple, efficient piece of genre machinery. It may not be much—but it’s better than a lot of what currently circulates in the horror aisle.