Primate (2025) Review!!

Synopsis – A group of friends’ tropical vacation turns into a terrifying, primal tale of horror and survival.

My Take – While the ‘Planet of the Apes‘ franchise has been dominating screens with layered story-lines, for his latest, writer-director Johannes Roberts (Strangers: Prey At Night, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City) and co-writer Ernest Riera, forgoes all complexities to bring a simple but brutal tale about a pet chimpanzee who after contracting rabies goes on to ravage a group of twenty-somethings in a lavish Hawaiian home.

Exactly on the lines of Cujo (1981) and Shakma (1990), the goofy under seen schlocker about a baboon driven wild by an experimental drug.

Delivering a surgically well-made crowd-pleaser that works very well as a pseudo-slasher flick where the killer is an intelligent animal who, besides having incredible strength, can understand human language and even communicate back. Factors that makes the proceedings all the more chilling and uncanny.

Running for just 89 minutes, the film leaves little room for life lessons and instead keeps us focused on its gruesome pressure-cooker experience.

Yes, it won’t be counted among modern creature feature classics like The Shallows (2016) and Crawl (2019) , but director Roberts, who had also helmed the hit shark thriller 47 Meters Down (2017) and its superior 2019 follow-up, is at his savviest and most ruthlessly efficient here, ensuring his pet chimp gone wild story makes for giddy, gory good time.

The story follows Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), who is traveling back to her home state of Hawaii, along with her best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Kate’s unwelcome third-wheel friend Hannah (Jessica Alexander). A year has passed since Lucy’s mother, a linguistics professor trying to bridge animal-human communication, passed away from cancer, leaving a hole in her remaining family: Lucy’s younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and their widowed father, Adam (Troy Kotsur), a deaf author who writes best-selling crime novels.

But there’s one other member of the family who surprises Lucy’s friends: their pet chimpanzee Ben (Miguel Torres Umba), who was domesticated when the late matriarch’s linguistics work followed her home from the lab, and has since then lived with the family in their lux, and crucially remote, cliff side house. While the ongoing tension between Lucy and Hannah begins to grow, particularly due to the presence of local love interest Nick (Benjamin Cheng), Kate’s brother, the vacation takes a dark turn when Ben contracts rabies.

Soon enough, the kindly creature turning into a ferocious wild animal and goes on a rampage, slaughtering any human he comes across, family or not. And with Adam away for a book event and Lucy and her pals’ cellphones out of reach, they frantically jump into the pool, knowing that Ben cannot swim. But they need to contact the authorities because Ben has bitten a chunk out of Erin’s leg, leaving her life hanging in the balance.

When the first scene of your film features someone’s face getting ripped off, it’s evident the filmmaker isn’t playing around. The film relishes its simple setup, staging the film as a showdown between humans and chimpanzee inside the tropical home. Here, director Roberts takes full advantage of his R rating, with more jaw-snapping, head-smashing, bone-crunching violence than we’ve seen in a studio horror for a while. It’s inventively, memorably nasty and he doesn’t use his gore to sacrifice the slow, seat-edge build, Ben’s unpredictable behavior keeping us on our toes.

He does his best work when incorporating silence into his suspense sequences. Lucy and her family communicate with Ben through American Sign Language, the same language Adam uses to interact with the world, and later in the film again turns down the volume in order to increase the tension. Characters try not to make a sound as they move through the house so as not to attract Ben’s attention, and the picture occasionally puts us inside Adam’s head, showing us how he is unaware of what is happening in other rooms because he is deaf.

And of course, Ben is a frightening character. Besides jaw removals and fatal thrashings, the chimp taunts his victims with malicious cackles and taps on his voice pad, such as pressing “Dead” on repeat. It also helps that the creature work is remarkably effective, a rare modern feat of practical effects and it pulls us that much closer to the chaos unfolding, adding a physical connection to something that could have felt digitally alienating. Ben’s journey to becoming a full, sadistic slasher villain gets a tad laughable by the end but there’s such electricity to the extended family-fights-back finale, that viewers will be too engaged to care.

Director Roberts has no interest in turning this into a social commentary or offering a lesson. He avoids both questioning the ethics of owning a chimp and remarking on the social and economic implications of outsiders buying up land in Hawaii. There’s no pretense or greater meaning behind the film that I could discern, nor even a thematic thrust.

Instead, the film is content as a relentless killer-animal flick that immerses the viewer in a breathless moment-to-moment immediacy. Sure, the film could have benefited from another draft of the screenplay to give the material some substance and the characters some depth, but, regardless, director Roberts achieves a blood-curdling, efficient B-film. It’s simple, straightforward, and effective.

Performance wise, Johnny Sequoyah, Victoria Wyant, Jessica Alexander, Gia Hunter and Benjamin Cheng bring in committed turns, while Troy Kotsur get to put in any legitimately compelling work. His deafness gives his character Adam a unique connection to Ben, especially since he’s his caretaker, and practically his father. On the whole, ‘Primate‘ is a simple-minded horror flick that ensures we have a giddy, gory good time.