Directed by Johannes Roberts | Starring Johnny Sequoyah, Troy Kotsur, Miguel Torres Umba, Jessica Alexander | Rated R | 1 hr 29 min | Paramount Pictures
January has long been Hollywood’s dumping ground — the no-man’s-land between Oscar season and the spring blockbuster push, where studios quietly deposit films they’d rather not fight over. Which makes Primate such a welcome aberration. Directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City), this lean, mean creature feature arrives in the new year with more self-awareness, craft, and sheer visceral energy than it has any right to.
The premise is deceptively simple: a family’s beloved pet chimpanzee, Ben, contracts rabies and turns homicidal. What unfolds is essentially Cujo with a chimp and a cliffside infinity pool instead of a dog and a broken-down car. It’s shameless in its B-movie DNA — and utterly committed to it.
Paradise Lost
The setup follows Lucy Pinborough (Johnny Sequoyah), a college student returning to her family’s architecturally stunning home embedded in a Hawaiian cliff after years of self-imposed estrangement following her mother’s death. She brings along her best friend Kate and a rotating cast of college-aged companions, each telegraphing their survival odds the moment they appear on screen. Her father Adam (an excellent Troy Kotsur, fresh off his Oscar win for CODA) is away when things go sideways — a convenient plot device, yes, but the film earns the contrivance by spending just enough time on the family’s fractured dynamic to make us care.
Ben, played through an impressive combination of practical effects and CGI by Miguel Torres Umba, is the film’s crown jewel. Originally the test subject of a linguistic researcher, the chimpanzee communicates in sign language — a detail the film uses with genuine cleverness, particularly in scenes involving Kotsur’s deaf character Adam. When rabies strips away Ben’s learned civility and replaces it with something ancient and feral, the contrast is genuinely unsettling.
The Pool as Crucible
The film’s midsection, in which Lucy and her friends take refuge in and around the family’s cliffside pool, is where Primate truly earns its popcorn. Chimpanzees, it turns out, have an instinctive fear of deep water — a fact the screenplay leans on to create a taut, extended siege sequence that plays like a slasher film crossed with a nature documentary. The pool becomes their cage, and the film wrings genuine suspense from this single, elegant constraint.
The gore is unapologetically extreme and executed almost entirely with practical effects — a refreshing tactility in an era of digitally sanitized horror. Roberts doesn’t shy away from depicting just how catastrophically powerful a full-grown chimpanzee actually is. Real-world accounts of chimpanzee attacks have always noted their terrifying strength, and the film honors — if that’s the right word — this biological reality with a series of kills that will leave squeamish viewers gripping their armrests.
Lean and Self-Aware
At 89 minutes, Primate doesn’t overstay its welcome. Roberts gets you in, puts you through the wringer, and sends you back out into the night shaken and satisfied. There’s a comedic undertone running throughout — the film is aware of its own absurdity and occasionally winks at the audience without ever fully collapsing into parody. Some of those winks land better than others, and a sharper comic edge might have elevated the film from solidly effective to genuinely memorable.
The human characters, it must be said, are largely functional archetypes rather than fully realized people. The college friends exist on a spectrum from “you know their fate immediately” to “might survive if they’re lucky,” and the film’s emotional core depends almost entirely on the chemistry between Sequoyah and Kotsur — chemistry that, thankfully, registers. Sequoyah carries the film with a grounded, physical performance, while Kotsur brings unexpected warmth and gravitas to a role that could easily have been a throwaway.
Verdict
Primate is not reinventing the horror wheel. Its plot mechanics are familiar, its character beats well-worn, and its January release window tells you where Paramount itself placed it in the pecking order. But within its chosen lane — the lean, gnarly, old-school creature feature — it executes with skill and genuine enthusiasm. The practical gore is tactile and shocking, the central conceit is cleverly exploited, and Kotsur’s presence lends the film a surprising emotional anchor. Roberts may not have made a great film, but he’s made a very good one of its kind.
That’s one bad ape, and Primate is one lean, mean, effective chiller.
Rating: 4/5
You can watch on:
- Amazon
- Paramount+