‘Primate’ Review

Last year, sleep deprived on a flight to who knows where, I found myself binging the constantly bewildering ‘Chimp Crazy’, the HBO documentary series about the quirky people who seek – sometimes cruelly, sometimes lovingly – to domesticate chimpanzees. Drawn as they are by chimps’ natural intelligence and humanity, these people lose sight of just how dangerous these animals can be. Sometimes with deadly consequences.

This subject matter has been explored in several films, such as Jordan Peele’s ‘Nope’, which opens with a sequence of sitcom chimpanzee named Gordy attacking his costars on set, resulting in several deaths. This scene serves as a springboard to explore bigger ideas about how humans exploit animals at their own peril.

‘Primate’, the gory horror film from Johannes Roberts, has no such high-mindedness. This is a movie that knows what it wants to be, and delivers with aplomb, refusing to waste any runtime over-explaining its story in favor of a frenetic immediacy, with each moment logically leading into the next, as characters desperately try to survive the night. After showing a man get his face ripped off within the first five minutes, ‘Primate’ establishes itself as a cutthroat, lean, blood-soaked romp of a monster movie.

The movie opens with Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), returning home to Hawaii with best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and tag-a-long Hannah (Jessica Alexander). Lucy brings them to her house, where her father Adam (Troy Kotsur) and sister Erin (Gia Hunter) live with the family’s pet chimpanzee, Ben. Initially put off by Ben’s presence, Lucy’s guests eventually warm up to him given his obvious intelligence and friendliness. But when Ben gets bitten by a rabid mongoose, that intelligence is used for far more sinister purposes than simply communicating with his family.

A monster movie is ultimately only as good as its monster, and Ben the Chimpanzee is a memorable and terrifying horror villain, equal parts Cujo and Chucky. As Ben devolves into murderous madness from rabies, he also exhibits a sadistic joy in toying with his victims. Ben smiles as he kills, taunting his prey constantly, whether it be with a surprise set of car keys or his trusty tablet that allows him to communicate with the touch of a button. By giving Ben such a deadly sense of humor, ‘Primate’ creates a monster who is unforgettable and horrific, with a descent into evil that is ultimately a tragedy.

So many elements of ‘Primate’ help elevate the film above more generic horror fare. Its Hawaiian, glass house setting allows for beautiful and clever visual layering and blocking, its cast is very good throughout, doing just enough to imbue all of these beautiful idiots with some semblance of personality and backstory without getting too distracted from the film’s primary goal of delivering as much macabre madness as humanly possible.

The order of kills – and there are plenty of meat bags fed into the ‘Primate’ murder machine – is surprising given how all of the character dynamics are initially established, showing filmmaker Johannes Roberts understands audience expectations enough to subvert them in thrilling ways. Roberts, just like Ben the primate, relishes in the gory death scenes, with the movie being at its most fun when two sex-obsessed frat bros crash the party hoping to get laid, with Roberts taking cruel pleasure from playing up their himbo-ness as they loaf about, oblivious to the dangers ahead.

Roberts’s direction throughout is strong, delivering kill sequences that are inventive and gruesome while also being genuinely upsetting. Casting the great Troy Kotsur, most well-known from his Oscar winning performance in ‘CODA’, allows Roberts to play with sound to heighten the suspense, cutting out the audio whenever we follow Kotsur’s perspective to mirror his deafness and consequent aloofness to the mayhem occurring just outside his field of view.

The wonderful score from Adrian Johnston is reminiscent of Goblin’s iconic music from Dario Argento’s ‘Suspiria’, a synth-based surreal nightmare befitting a horror story in which a group of well meaning twenty-somethings are hunted by a beloved primate in a t-shirt like some bloodthirsty Winnie the Ape.

Coming in at a brisk 89 minutes, ‘Primate’ is a devious, delightful surprise of a film, that tells a cohesive, character driven story filled with moments of humor, tension, and ape-based carnage.

Primate
Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language, and some drug use.
Running Time: 1 hour and 29 minutes

Director Johannes Roberts
Writers Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera
Stars Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Troy Kotsur
Rating R
Running Time 89 Minutes
Genres Horror