Primate Review: Killer Chimp Movie Is Bananas

There is a school of thought which states the scariest 43 seconds of Jordan Peele’s Nope belong to the first moments when a chimpanzee has a child cornered. If you’re of that persuasion, then Johannes Roberts’ Primate offers a brutal expansion of that dread to feature length, now with the gory bits painstakingly filled in.

Premiering with a a buzz of shrieks and nervous titters at the opening night of Fantastic Fest last week, Primate displays a commitment that borders on tunnel vision in its delivery of sadistic set pieces and simian-on-simian savagery. Roberts, the promising genre director of 47 Metres Down—back before he got waylaid by studio box-checking in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City—was on hand in Austin to state he considers Stephen King’s Cujo a major influence on Primate. There are definite similarities, particularly since both stories involve a parent and child who are bedeviled by a family pet with rabies.

However, Primate represents a different kind of cathartic release for Roberts, who eschews King’s penchant for humanity and sentimentality. In fact, despite being a studio release that is clearly intended for a wide teen audience, Primate amounts to the most ruthlessly mean-spirited and nasty little horror movie to come out of a Hollywood major in recent memory. And on those grounds alone, it makes for a delightful theatrical experience in a crowded theater as its young, chipper, and amiable cast of meat-sacks get absolutely obliterated by a monkey jonesing to go apeshit on its owners.

Among these mostly doomed animal lovers is our central heroine Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), the eldest sister of a sibling pair raised in an opulent but dangerously remote home in Hawaii. The father of Lucy and younger Ellie (Gia Hunter) is a successful, hearing-impaired author (CODA’s Troy Kotsur), who loves his children almost as much as their pet chimpanzee Ben. Rest assured though that Benny is the baby of the family. Lucy even brings a stuffed animal to the little guy at the beginning of the story after coming home with friends from college. Alas, few kin or kindred spirits seem to notice the Ben is acting strange after a mongoose was able to sneak into his enclosure and bite the chimp earlier in the week. And whether your point of reference is Cujo or Old Yeller, you know where this is going…

What makes Primate such a crowdpleaser (at least among a very specific crowd) is not the familiarity of the story nor the often banal and archetypal characterization in a screenplay by Ernest Riera and Roberts. It is how those elements are redirected as an engine to deliver positively crushing spectacles of slaughter that make Primate at times sickening and at other moments strangely joyful. Every sequence where Ben corners or stalks one of his intended victims tortures the audience as much as the prey with the knowledge of what apes gone berserk can do to a human being. The first kill scene, in fact,  is almost giddy as it says boo while a character has his face ripped from the bone in a shock moment that’s more Halloween silly than Eli Roth gross-out.

There is a deliberate element of camp at play in Primate, which is acutely aware of the tropes it splashes around in like a gorilla in a newly discovered watering hole. They’re also delivered by a game cast, including Kotsur who projects a small touch of gravitas in his handful of scenes. Apparently the Oscar winner was cast after the role had originally been written for a hearing-abled actor. Yet the way that Roberts uses the change to derive more grueling tension out of the character’s daughter and audiences seeing the rabid chimp, but Kotsur and the sound-design being completely blank, speaks to the movie’s real driving interest: cruel, smirking anticipation.

In a similar vein is how the film’s central home, and its undergirding set design, is built around a swimming pool that’s carved out of a rock face high above a jagged seaside cliff. The dizzying splendor of an infinity pool facing an abyss becomes a gilded cage after Lucy, Ellie, and their friends get stranded inside the water. (Chimpanzees, we are told, cannot swim, rabid or otherwise.) Surrounded by a long drop on one side, and mad monkey on the other, the movie successfully turns a family pet into an onscreen menace comparable to an ‘80s slasher icon whose found their dream boiler room or camp ground.

The film’s special effects likewise reveal a thoughtful cunning. Large amounts of digital trickery are employed to create a CG-ape during the action sequences, but the implementation is surprisingly eerie, with Ben’s face becoming evermore enraged the further the virus spreads into his brain. Yet unlike other animal-attack flicks, this is a species where we can see the wheels turn. Imagine if Cujo could dabble in mind games. At one point, Ben even takes the modern tools that zookeepers use to communicate with apes to send Lucy and company a message: he keeps smashing the word “DEAD” while watching with pleasure as the kids shiver in the pool.

The ensemble is game, and Sequoyah makes a plausible final girl who has the wrinkle of knowing her monster from a previous life. Admittedly, any attempts at depth, subtext, or emotional texture are treated as perfunctory by a script that is ultimately happy to be about nothing. However, the real squeamish fun is there whenever Lucy or a friend dares to leave the pool for a phone or maybe some medicine; inevitably they end up trapped in a small room with a face that appears just human enough to also pass for demonic. It’s as surface level as the pool that becomes many of the characters’ tomb. But like any Hawaiian body of water, there is something inviting about the picture’s monkey games.

Primate opens on Jan. 9, 2026.

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