2026 | rated R | starring Johnny Sequoyah, Jess Alexander, Troy Kotsur, Gia Hunter | directed by Johannes Roberts | 1 hr 32 mins | 4 out of 5 |
Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns to her Hawaiian home with a group of friends after their first year of college, introducing them to her father (Troy Kutsur, CODA), sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and her pet chimpanzee Ben. But Ben has eaten something rabid and turns on the teenagers, unleashing a night of survival terror as they fight to survive against the strong, smart, menacing chimp.
Primate joins a line of When Animals Attack movies that includes Stephen King’s Cujo, the infamous Tippi Hedren lion-fest Roar, the tiger-in-the-house movie Burning Bright, Alejandra Aja’s hurricane set alligator film Crawl and the exceedingly fun sloth-in-a-sorority house movie Slotherhouse, among many, many, others. Because the premise of trapping us with animals is inherently a bit convoluted it takes a lot of guts and commitment to not lean into the camp quality of them and take this threat seriously. It is to its benefit that Primate takes the threat of a signing pet monkey who wears a T-shirt and is given the innocent name Ben, is taken very seriously. Director Johannes Roberts doesn’t blink here and makes the best movie of his career here. A promising director of the superior Strangers sequel Prey at Night, Roberts has since been a workman studio guy limping through the 47 Meters Down shark attack series and the dull but not terrible Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City. Given a small budget and a high concept premise, he juices the monkey terror here for all it’s worth.
Above all, Primate manages to be for me at least, something few horror movies are – it’s actually scary. Most of that falls in the creation and execution of Ben. As much as a loved the recent Planet of the Apes series, even there I feel like I’m watching a very well-done work of CGI art. Here, Ben looks real. When he shares the screen with actors, he looks real. When he jumps around and squeals and smashes people with rocks or even pushes the button on a Talking device to threaten everyone with the word “dead”, he looks real – and wild and unpredictable. There is something frightening about taking an animal into your house, domesticating it for years and having it pretend to play with you one minute, snap and a second later rip your face off to the bone. The movie treats Ben like an animal and not a precious natural creature we still need to protect during its violent rampage. It’s rabid – go. It’s a refreshing thing.
As Ben starts acting violent, our heroes jump into a backyard infinity pool to keep away from the hydrophobic monkey. On one side is Ben, on another is a cliff-face and in the pool are bitten and bloody survivors. Within this Cujo setting the movie traffics in frat boys to come help the girls and get in Ben’s path of destruction and reasons they need to get out of the pool at a solid clip. The violence is brutal and nasty, jaws are ripped off, faces smashed in, scalps ripped off.
The characters are the film’s weak spot, they’re 2-dimensional cannon fodder for Ben, even our heroine Lucy who should be the most torn up over her childhood friend attacking her new friends. I found myself most interested in Hannah (Jess Alexander, The Beauty), who is disliked by Lucy and trying to it into the group despite her own bad acts toward them. She was the only person I didn’t want to die. Worldbuilding is confined to the house, but it is a cool one, with the infinity pool, overhangs, open kitchen and rock walls it’s modern, tropical and full of places for Ben to leap off of. We also get some clever set pieces set around dad’s deafness, where the movie drops out the audio around him and we experience the silence that allows Ben to creep around undetected behind him.
But Ben is the star of the show here. That menacing, creepy monkey that treats us like animals. This unassuming little animal attack movie is well put together with a surprisingly viscous bite. I was pulled along with it.