So much for species equality on screen. Over the past decade-plus, in movies like the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise or the Robbie Williams vehicle Better Man, the computer-generated chimpanzee has been a symbol of evolution and humanity—sad, intelligent, soulful. (Though featuring a different genus, the new blockbusters involving King Kong similarly depict the gorilla as a nice guy.) Yet here comes Primate to lay waste to these fantasies of human-animal harmony. The monkey here may be smart, but he sure isn’t friendly; he’s a fearsome killing machine who uses his mighty strength to facilitate his appetite for brutal, bloody violence. I’m surprised PETA hasn’t called for a boycott.
Not that Ben, the titular beast who is played (sort of) by Miguel Torres Umba, initially seems like a bad boy. He instead presents as the happy and docile pet of Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a university student returning to her gorgeous home in Hawaii, where life seems pretty good. Lucy’s late mother was an expert linguist who taught Ben to communicate by punching buttons on a vocalizing tablet, allowing him and others to mash together noun-adjective combinations like “Ben happy” and “Lucy sorry.” Her half-absent father (Troy Kotsur) is the author of a lucrative mystery series with unfortunate titles like “A Silent Scream,” and its popularity has afforded him a swanky beachfront estate that would make the tech bros from Mountainhead jealous. Her younger sister (Gia Hunter) is resentful toward her—apparently for the sin of, I dunno, going to college?—but they quickly patch things up, and Lucy anticipates luxuriating with family, friends, and her favorite furball.
We know better, and not just because we’re familiar with the movie’s marketing. Primate’s flash-forward cold open, in which a hapless veterinarian (Rob Delaney) saunters into Ben’s enclosure and quickly turns into chimp food, reveals that the ape has been infected with rabies—a disease that’s turned him from a charming simian accessory into a feral death dispenser. With dark lighting and ominous music, director Johannes Roberts seems to be mimicking the introduction to Jurassic Park, but whereas Steven Spielberg shrouded his deadly dinos in shadow, Roberts has no such interest in playing coy; instead he supplies the gruesome display of Ben ripping the skin off a man’s face. The message is blunt: When it comes to gore, this flick isn’t monkeying around.
It’s probably unfair to describe Primate as akin to any other creature feature, only with more bloodshed. Sure, there’s no depth to the basic plot, in which Lucy and other assorted tremblers run and shriek and die as Ben goes on a rampage. But Roberts and his co-writer, Ernest Riera, execute this straightforward setup with a measure of wit and innovation. In particular, the detail that Ben is scared of water allows the mansion’s cliffside pool to serve as a kind of sanctuary—a home base from which the humans can strategize and rejuvenate, even as they’re literally treading water. The result is a movie that hybridizes the remorseless slasher elements of Halloween with the sweaty calculation of The Shallows.
Primate never approaches the (ahem) primal tension of either of those films, in part because it’s more invested in ghastly jolts than true suspense. This doesn’t mean that its set pieces are inert. A frantic escape to a parked car makes clever use of a key fob, while a few whispered sequences weaponize the sound of silence. And in an era of PG-13-inspired sanitation, there’s something crudely satisfying about its extremism, particularly during a slow-developing, bone-crunching kill that puts the “ill” in mandible.
Yet while Primate’s gore may be voluminous, it actually tries to distinguish itself from modern genre fare through absence. It has no frills, no dreary trauma metaphors, no enigmatic themes, no convoluted backstory. These nominal negatives are designed to underscore the picture’s bestial intensity, but they really just create a void in lieu of a center. Sequoyah is a sympathetic presence, but Roberts doesn’t care about Lucy, or any of his characters; they’re all just items to be dutifully ticked off of Ben’s kill list.
There’s nothing wrong with a horror movie that prioritizes gnarly violence over human dimension. But for that method to work, the action needs to be truly gripping, and while Primate offers a few inventive moments, its execution is too predictable and mechanical to hook you. Its only real apprehension derives from the audience speculating about the order of deaths. Lucy is an obvious final girl, and her sister is too precious to demise, but what about her dad, or her childhood bestie, or those strutting chumps she met on the plane? The film seems engineered to be watched in conjunction with a betting app, inviting you to wager on whom Ben bludgeons next.
Visually speaking, Primate generally adheres to its humans’ point of view, but it’s more aligned with its rabid killer ape, both spiritually and biologically. It just wants to throw down and raise hell—a noble if primitive goal. But chimpanzees aren’t people, and while this movie’s body may be one of engaging brute force, it rages in service of an undeveloped brain.
Grade: C+
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.