By George & Josh Bate
There’s Cujo the killer dog. There’s Bruce the killer shark. Hell, there’s even the killer, cocaine-fueled bear in Cocaine Bear. Now, there’s Ben the killer chimp in Primate, an unabashedly fun, old-school nature-gone-wrong creature feature destined to thrill audiences.
From director and co-writer Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City), Primate follows Lucy (played by Dexter: New Blood’s Johnny Sequoyah), a college student who returns to her family home in Hawaii after a period away. While home, Lucy and her friends are able to reconvene with Lucy’s deaf father Adam (Troy Kotsur) and the family’s pet chimp Ben. Things go from peaceful to painful, however, when Ben contracts rabies and turns violent, forcing Lucy, her sister Erin, and her friends to devise creative ways to survive the clever, vicious chimp.
Primate demonstrates that, with craft and ingenuity, even the most long-standing of horror sub-genres still have plenty to offer audiences. Nature-gone-rogue or animal horror features are commonplace (Fantastic Fest even has another nature-gone-rogue film, Coyotes, premiering this year), and director Johannes Roberts is no stranger to them having competently helmed two films in the 47 Meters Down franchise. But there’s a number of aspects about Primate that see the Fantastic Fest premiere stand out and even captivate.
For starters, Primate sports a clever spin on the genre’s core premise. Lucy’s deceased mother was an ape researcher and kept Ben the chimp as a pet. Over the years, Ben became an integral member of the family and has great comradery with and love for Lucy, her sister, and father. Ben’s turn from friend to foe initially fosters moral qualms in Lucy and her sister. Imagine if your beloved dog, for instance, suddenly became violent and destructive? How would you navigate the situation? Would you try to kill the dog? At least at first, before the violence really ramps up, Primate interestingly contemplates these questions and, like the best of horror movies, takes a potentially realistic scenario (i.e., your pet catching rabies) to its most extreme.
Primate further distinguishes itself through the creative integration of hydrophobia in the story. Text that opens the film details hydrophobia, also known as a fear of water, can be a symptom of rabies and explains why chimps often avoid large bodies of water. After keeping this concept in its back pocket for a while, Roberts’ film embraces it by having Lucy, her sister, and friends retreat into their swimming pool in order to avoid the wrath of Ben the chimp. Ben circles the pool, and finds all kinds of innovative ways to get close to the girls, but his crazed phobia prevents him from taking the leap that will see him get his hands on his family-turned-victims. All of this makes for a number of scenes soaked in intensity and suspense, in a manner we haven’t seen in a movie before.
Without a weapon and distanced from their cell phones, Lucy and company find themselves confined to their house with Ben intent on killing them. But this isn’t just any house. Primate’s location scouters and/or production designers deserve immense plaudits for employing a novel, interactive contained setting for our protagonists. Roberts uses every inch of the sprawling Hawaii house, which is isolated and has a pool that borders a massive cliff, to his advantage, creating tons of memorable scares and points of tension. Roberts also ensures that the audience quickly develops a firm grasp on the geography of the house, which makes the viewing all the more immersive and visceral as we can more firmly put ourselves in Lucy’s shoes.
As expected, not everyone survives Ben’s wrath. But, for the audience, that’s okay, because there are some truly gnarly kills to behold here. The film doesn’t waste a second with a gruesome kill in the opening scene that perfectly sets the stage for the carnage to come. Roberts and his team don’t hold back with the brutality of their kills, ensuring that Primate will satisfy even the most bloodthirsty of horror fanatics.
Perhaps Primate‘s greatest strength, however, is its deft balancing of high-stakes tension and morbid humor. Many times, the inclusion of comedy in horror movies undercuts the suspense – just when you’re really immersed in a particular high-stakes situation, a joke can completely take you out of it. Thankfully, this is not the case with Primate. Roberts’ film unrelentingly maintains its intensity, while also generating some great laughs from Ben the chimp (played phenomenally in costume by Miguel Torres Umba). Brought to life with stunning practical effects, Ben isn’t your average horror movie creature as he has real personality and even charm to him. While Lucy and the other humans are experiencing a night from hell, Ben toys and has all sorts of fun as he reigns chaos upon his loved ones. There are multiple laugh-out-loud moments that come from Ben’s behavior, in particular his ominous use of a lexigram to threaten Lucy. It’s clear these moments are over-the-top, but establishing Ben’s intelligence and personality early on, in addition to never losing sight of the terrifying situation at hand, makes them enjoyable and engaging, rather than derailing and distracting.
Similarly terrifying and novel is the inclusion of a deaf actor and character in such a perilous situation. Academy Award winner Troy Kotsur has established a reputation for incredible dramatic performances, but it’s nice to see him feature in a fun horror flick here. While Kotsur is peripheral for most of the film, his re-entry into the story delivers one of the film’s most memorable sequences, which takes advantage of lack of hearing for maximal terror.
Kotsur and his co-stars deliver performances and are given just enough material to make us care for the characters. There’s certainly some drama introduced in the film that goes nowhere, and there are a few characters whose inclusions are solely for them to be fodder for the killer chimp. Nonetheless, star Johnny Sequoyah brings a groundedness and naturalism to her performance as Lucy and leads her first horror film with amazing confidence and grace.
Elevating the drama, scares, and old-school thrills of Primate is a haunting, synth, John Carpenter-inspired score that ranks among our favorite horror movie scores in recent years. The inspirations from Carpenter’s scores for Christine and Halloween are clear (Roberts even joked in a Q&A after the film that Carpenter is currently suing him for how similar Primate’s score is to Carpenter’s work). With out-of-tune piano sounds and 80s synth dialed up, it’s the kind of musical score that could accompany most horror movies and make them even better.
VERDICT: 7.5/10
Premiering at this year’s Fantastic Fest, Primate is an unabashedly fun, old-school nature-gone-wrong creature feature destined to thrill audiences. Although far from the first film of its type, director Johanne Roberts puts a variety of clever spins on the horror subgenre, including moral questions about having to fight your beloved pet and containing its characters to a pool to prevent a rabid hydrophobic chimp from killing them. Primate’s greatest strength, however, is its deft balancing of high-stakes tension and morbid humor. High-stakes and gnarly kills that will satisfy the most bloodthirsty of horror fanatics are maintained throughout, while Ben the chimp generates plenty of laugh out loud moments that never undercut the tension. Unlike the villainously playful Ben, the human characters may be thinly developed, but a natural performance from Johnny Sequoyah and innovative inclusion of a deaf actor in Troy Kotsur give audiences just enough to care about what’s happening to them. Elevating the drama, scares, and old-school thrills is a haunting, synth, John Carpenter-inspired score that ranks among our favorite horror movie scores in recent years. Primate is not scheduled to hit theaters until January 9, 2025, a remarkable four months after its debut at Fantastic Fest. It’s clear that Paramount have confidence in their new film, and rightfully so. Going ape shit has never been more fun.