For those who want a short, simple horror that delivers what it says on the tin, Primate will likely deliver. It’s well-crafted enough to be highly enjoyable for the right audience. But it’s simply too tonally confused and hollow for this critic to fully endorse.
Primate, for better or worse, does exactly what it says on the poster. A monkey goes beserk, and gory deaths ensue. For those who crave a short, springy creature feature, this may well be enough. It’s just a shame that, for all its various fun moments, it comes across as a bit lightweight. Caught between being funny and being graphic, it’s a film that occasionally entertains but ultimately proves to be an underdeveloped damp squib.
College student Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns to her native Hawaii after years away. Joining her are life-long friends Kate and Nick (Victoria Wyant and Benjamin Cheng, respectively), as well as fellow student Hannah (Jessica Alexander), who is the definition of a frenemy for Lucy. They plan to stay in Lucy’s family home with her younger sister, Erin (Gia Hunter), and her hard-of-hearing father, Adam (Troy Kotsur), a renowned author. Also living in the luxurious cliffside home is their pet chimpanzee Ben (Miguel Torres Umba), a pet of Lucy’s late mother, a linguistics expert whom Lucy still misses terribly.
Adam has to leave the house for a book signing, but before he leaves, he notices that a wild mongoose bit Ben in his cage, so he asks Lucy to keep an eye on him. Sure enough, Ben contracts rabies from the mongoose bite and brutally tears the face off of a veterinarian who comes to check on him. Now out of control from the pain, Ben begins a rampage throughout the house, mauling the group of students one by one as Lucy and the gang desperately try to figure out a way to stop him.
Jessica Alexander as “Hannah” and Miguel Torres Umba as “Ben” in Primate from Paramount Pictures.
Writer-director Johannes Roberts and co-writer Ernest Riera evidently have a great admiration for the horror genre and the work that goes into building suspense. There are several parallels with Stephen King’s story Cujo, which also featured a rabid animal as the antagonist. But Roberts demonstrates his and his team’s own capacity to create atmosphere from a somewhat familiar story. Darkly lit scenes are crafted to obscure sight and put the fear of unknown whereabouts into our heads as much as the characters’. One taut scene sees Lucy hiding in a wardrobe as Ben searches inches away from her. It’s a moment that recalls a similar scene in John Carpenter’s Halloween, while also building on the cornerstone of suspense: the anticipation of discovery and brutality that makes one uneasy.
It’s just a pity that the characters occupying these otherwise well-crafted visuals are extraordinarily bland, with no real discernible arcs for any of them outside of maybe Kotsur’s character. There are unique traits and dynamics to each character, be it Lucy’s crush on Nick or the amusing frenemy dynamic between Lucy and Hannah, yet there’s no development to these ideas beyond just being surface-level characteristics. When one of them dies, it’s not long before the rest of them move on. One of them gets a particularly amusing death when their own greed bites them in the ass, but the characters don’t seem to hold much connection with one another.
Therefore, nobody seems to care all that much when they inevitably sustain injuries or, worst-case scenario, get their skulls caved in by an angry monkey. Even Lucy’s feelings over her mother’s death are relegated to the background and seem to disappear from the film entirely by the third act. It evokes that age-old question: “If the characters don’t care, then why should the audience?”
Not helping is the lack of variety in the film’s graphic setpieces. The scientific term for rabies is hydrophobia, as it was initially thought to be a fear of water. Thus, much of the film sees the characters trapped in a swimming pool. They get out of the water, race into the house to get something, then race back into the water. This same sequence plays out repeatedly, creating stagnation in forward momentum in some places. When the horror reaches the house, the graphic sequences seem contained to the same two or three rooms rather than across the whole complex. It creates the impression of a horror narrative that doesn’t play out organically, but instead waits for the characters to make stupid enough decisions so that the pieces can repeat their movements.
There’s clearly an effort to balance both horror and comedy in this picture, and occasionally the balance is just right. The film’s best moment involves a setup and payoff with chauvinist frat boys, the students meet on the plane home. They flirt with the girls, clearly only wanting one thing from them. Thus, when they arrive on the scene later with a rabid chimp on the loose, there’s only one way this can go. The absurdity of the setup, twinned with the comeuppance for these kids’ chauvinism, makes for an undeniably amusing moment.
Sadly, more often than not, the film’s comedy struggles to fit in with the horror, creating tonal whiplash between various scenes. Troy Kotsur was a revelation in CODA, a tender, life-affirming film that rightfully won him an Oscar, and he brings gravitas to his role, stealing the show in the few scenes he appears in. But the rest of the cast are stuck playing two-dimensional moving targets, their performances cheapened by the material’s weakness. As such, it’s hard to really get anything other than the odd spike of shock or amusement from this glass-half-empty picture.
For those who want a short, simple horror that delivers what it says on the tin, Primate will likely deliver. It’s well-crafted enough to be highly enjoyable for the right audience. But it’s simply too tonally confused and hollow for this critic to fully endorse. At the risk of sounding like the world’s most joyless cynic, it all just feels like an excuse to craft scenes of an animal mauling people. I like a fun, hogwild creature feature as much as the next person, but there doesn’t appear to be any broader meaning or point to Primate other than the observation that keeping chimps as pets isn’t a good idea. Frankly, I don’t need a movie to tell me that!
Primate is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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