Crew
Director – Johannes Roberts, Screenplay – Ernest Riera & Johannes Roberts, Producers – Walter Hamada, John Hodges & Bradley Pilz, Photography – Stephen Murphy, Music – Adrian Johnston, Visual Effects – MPC (Supervisor – Jason Billington) & Outpost VFX (Supervisor – Remi Martin), Special Effects Supervisor – Jonathon Barrass, Creature Effects Designers – Neill Gorton & Kate Walshe, Production Design – Simon Bowles. Production Company – 18Hz.
Cast
Johnny Sequoyah (Lucy Pinborough), Troy Kotsur (Adam Pinborough), Miguel Torres Umba (Ben), Jessica Alexander (Hannah), Victoria Wyant (Kate), Gia Hunter (Erin Pinborough), Benjamin Cheng (Nick), Charlie Mann (Drew), Tienne Simon (Brad)
Plot
Lucy Pinborough arrives in Hawaii on vacation with several of her college friends. They go to stay with her father Adam, a successful novelist who is deaf, and her younger sister Erin. Lucy’s late mother was an acclaimed anthropologist specialising in linguistics. Living at the house is Ben, a chimpanzee Lucy’s mother taught to communicate using a sound keypad. Adam finds that a mongoose has gotten into the cage and bitten Ben. Adam then has to go away on a signing tour. As the others party, they discover that Ben has gotten free. However, Ben is infected with rabies from the bite and begins a murderous rampage through the house.
British director Johannes Roberts emerged during the early 2000s with a series of B-budgeted films, including Sanitarium (2001), Alice (2002), Darkhunters (2004), Hellbreeder (2004), Forest of the Damned (2005), F (2010), Roadkill (2011), Storage 24 (2012) and The Other Side of the Door (2016). There came a point where Roberts started to gain wider recognition. The theatrically-released 47 Meters Down (2017) received reasonable acclaim, which he followed with The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018), 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019) and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), as well as the standout Suicide Bid episode of V/H/S/99 (2022).
There have been a variety of films about killer Apes before. Setting aside all the giant ape films that derive from King Kong (1933), Primate most resembles Link (1986), which had Elisabeth Shue as an anthropology student trapped in her professor’s home with a murderous chimpanzee. There was also Shakma (1990) with a group of students trapped after hours in a laboratory by a killer baboon.
I was switched off Primate in the opening scenes. I have a complete lack of interest in yet another film about good-looking young millennials heading off to a weekend of partying and hanging out. This is something Primate seems destined to repeat. None of the characters have the slightest differentiation that could not be summarised in three words. Victoria Wyant is the best friend, Jessica Alexander is the frenemy, Benjamin Cheng is the token cute guy and Johnny Sequoyah is clearly pegged as the film’s Final Girl and that is about it in terms of any depth. Actually, the one who does best out of the exercise is deaf actor Troy Kotsur who plays the father.
That said, once Primate dispenses with the preliminaries and sets Ben loose, it turns into something else altogether. In no time, Roberts gets the film vicious and brutal as various of the cast are attacked or huddle in the pool mostly, occasionally other places like cupboards or beds, as the chimpanzee comes after them. The attacks are savage and nasty – I have never had the occasion to watched someone have their jaw wrenched off before. The opening scene alone dangles the image of someone getting their face torn off.
Through some two decades of work as a director, Johannes Roberts has the mechanics of suspense and tension well rehearsed. In this regard, Primate is a tightly polished machine that delivers the goods. There is no fat on the bone that distracts from that singular purpose. You could maybe object that the story and characters are fairly rudimentary but in terms of delivering the goods that it sets out to do, Primate achieves its aims admirably without anything more complicated beyond that.
Trailer here