‘Primate’ Movie Review: Chimp Slasher Movie, Good
Photo from Paramount Pictures
From Jeremy Kibler
Primate is how you update Cujo: turn the rabid St. Bernard into a chimpanzee and replace the trapped mother and son in a car with teenagers trapped in a pool on a cliffside home in Hawaii. Or, think Rise of the Planet of the Apes as more of a single-location slasher/survival thriller. However you want to pitch it, director Johannes Roberts’ high-concept horror movie is a blast. Apart from George A. Romero’s Monkey Shines, Congo, and the recurring sequences of Gordy the chimp in Jordan Peele’s Nope, no other entry in the when-animals-attack horror subgenre has really capitalized on the killer simian as effectively as Primate.
Lily James lookalike Johnny Sequoyah plays Lucy, the college-aged daughter who’s back home in the Aloha State to visit with her deaf author father (Troy Kotsur) and younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter). Joining Lucy at her house is her ride-or-die bestie Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Kate’s brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng), with whom Lucy is smitten, as well as Kate’s uninhibited friend Hannah (Jessica Alexander). Lucy has lost her linguistics-professor mom to cancer, but another member of her family is a chimpanzee named Ben. Just as Dad leaves for a book promotion, Ben contracts rabies from a rabid mongoose and becomes very, very violent. Bad chimp.
Primate starts with an unnecessary in medias res opening where a veterinarian makes his last house call, but it’s a brutal barometer for how hard the R-rated gore is going to go. As much as the groundwork for character dynamics is efficiently laid, the script by Roberts & Ernest Riera isn’t the strongest, particularly with early expository dialogue that tends to be clunky. However, simplicity is the name of the game here. For the narrative to move, characters also need to make brave moves, and they do. Specializing in trapped thrillers often involving water and tight quarters, director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged) knows how to keep audiences edgy, while making us generally care about the parties involved.
Johnny Sequoyah makes Lucy a sympathetic, levelheaded heroine, and Troy Kotsur (who won an Oscar for CODA) brings a warmth and paternal protection. Everyone else does exactly what they’re asked to do. Ben is seamlessly realized by actor/movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba, who’s inside a practical animatronic suit. Finding an empathy underneath the untamed violence that isn’t Ben’s fault, Umba deserves as much credit as Andy Serkis playing Caesar in the modern Planet of the Apes franchise. You never forget that this chimp is part of Lucy’s family, but even seeing Ben’s menacing face behind a frosted glass door or even the curtain of a canopy bed makes for an unsettling image.
While Primate goes exactly where you expect, it’s lean and mean. Getting impressively gnarly as it goes along, the film delivers every possible payoff one hopes for when teenagers get trapped in a pool by a rabid chimp. Two drunken, alpha-male characters are complete fodder for Ben, and one kill is such a satisfying jaw-dropper in terms of effects work. A few set-pieces are affectionately influenced by Halloween, Jurassic Park, and Scream, but they’re still skillfully staged and breathlessly tense as they should be. Roberts also craftily uses silence in terms of Lucy and Erin’s father being deaf. Much like Roberts’ own The Strangers: Prey at Night (and with a similar ending), the film is relentless and scored like a classic ‘80s John Carpenter flick with Adrian Johnston’s awesomely nightmarish and propulsive synth score.
Any movie, let alone a chimp-slasher movie, that can somehow get one a little misty-eyed is doing pretty well. Count Primate as a nastily fun surprise for the new year.
Rating: 3.5/5
Primate is currently in theaters.
