“Primate” (2025): Rabies Turns a Chimp into a Slasher Villain in This Silly But Visceral Thriller
If you’re inclined to be taxonomically literal-minded, you might say that most preexisting slasher-movie killers are already of the primate order (as are their victims). However, the new animal-attack horror flick “Primate” has the novel idea of pitting terrified Homo sapiens against a vicious hominid of a different species – the famously volatile chimpanzee. The result is the kind of entertainment that appeals to the more simian facets of our brains, but so long as it’s executed well, that shouldn’t be an insult.
A First-Rate-Looking Ape
“Primate” is executed very well. Right out of the gate, its first big win is the titular simian, Ben. At only a fraction of the budget available to the blockbuster “Planet of the Apes” reboot series, this film uses primarily practical effects – an animatronic and a suited-up creature performer, Miguel Torres Umba – to create a chimpanzee that is completely convincing throughout. The film wisely doesn’t make Ben large or imposing; on the contrary, there’s something almost childlike, albeit creepily so, about this three-foot-tall ape. This does nothing to undercut his sense of menace – few animals in the world are simultaneously as endearing and as terrifying as our closest relatives.
An Adorable Pet, a Tragic Infection
This dichotomy also perfectly fits the setup of “Primate”. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a college student, is returning with three friends to her Hawaiian home, a gorgeous, swanky abode perched atop a coastal cliff-top like a rural ocean-view penthouse. Here, she reunites with Ben, the beloved family pet brought home years ago by her late mother, a linguistic researcher who taught him how to speak in sign language and type on a soundboard. Pet chimps have been responsible for plenty of real-life horror stories, but Lucy seems justified in assuring her startled friends that sweet, friendly Ben would never hurt anyone.
Alas, Lucy never could have foreseen that Ben would receive a bite from a rabid mongoose. It truly is a wild card: as her unwitting father (Troy Kotsur) explains, Hawaii is outside the range of the rabies virus. Therefore, it doesn’t come across as a moronic slasher-film contrivance when he unconcernedly calls in a vet for a mere routine exam. He himself doesn’t even stick around for it: as a bestselling novelist, he has a book-signing event to get to. This ill-fated exam is actually the first scene in “Primate,” divorced of its subsequent context. It’s a chronology-bending gambit that serves primarily to give the target audience of gorehounds a gnarly appetizer to tide them over for the first act.
A Wealth of Gore And Supreme Suspense, Brought to You by Illogic
When the main course comes, it’s a bonanza worthy of Thanksgiving. Nearly every death in “Primate” is a spectacle of graphic, bone-crunching mutilation. These genre money shots are as anatomically convincing as the ape who administers them, but you’ll have to be a hard-core slasher fan to appreciate them with an unflinching gaze.
For Lucy and her friends, the only possible sanctuary from such gruesome fates is the house’s cliffside swimming pool, because chimps can’t swim. There’s also the fact that (as any “Old Yeller” fan will tell you) an old-fashioned word for rabies is “hydrophobia”; shockingly, despite mentioning this in its opening text, “Primate” never specifically utilizes the infected ape’s fear of water as a plot device. This results in at least one missed opportunity for the imperiled kids to weaponize the place where Ben traps them. (Oh, and don’t expect any explanation for how rabies got to Hawaii in the first place).
But then, the very premise of “Primate” requires some far more serious suspension of your virological disbelief. “What if Cujo had brains, hands, and the ability to climb?” is a great pitch until you realize that a rabies infection should severely impair all of these attributes. Instead, the plot is dependent on the chimpanzee’s ability to strategize, leap, and swing after his human targets, silently stalk them, manipulate objects, and (at one point) play the role of Ghostface in a remake of the cop-car scene from the original “Scream.”
Not that you’ll waste much (if any) time questioning such things, because “Primate”‘s director, horror veteran Johannes Roberts (“The Strangers: Prey at Night,” the “47 Meters Down” movies), is just as fiendishly clever. He and his co-screenwriter, Ernest Riera, are ingenious in their methods of milking relentless edge-of-your-seat tension from a movie that might have gotten away with being a mere gorefest. The camera seldom leaves Ben without making you wonder whether he’s lurking just beyond its margins, the house’s complicated geography becomes quickly and organically coherent, and even the aforementioned swimming pool is not a perfect sanctuary.
Characters to Take or Leave
“Primate” does not feature the sort of characters that one can expect a reviewer to recall in detail. Nonetheless, the performances are uniformly convincing, and one of the tensest sequences does have a slightly affecting undercurrent of kinship between Lucy and her best friend (Victoria Wyant). The two fratty boys who come over mid-movie for a good-time call are far less detestable than most characters of their horror-genre ilk, but don’t get too attached to them. The Oscar-winning Kotsur (“CODA,” “The Mandalorian”) has just the right intensity and physical presence to ground the third act, and his deafness raises the tension in a way that more horror movies should do.
One final note: On the subject of unattachment, “King Kong” aficionados should keep their eyes peeled for a subtle R-rated homage. It’s quite amusing, in the most macabre way imaginable.
