Home from college, Lucy reunites with family including pet chimp Ben. Ben contracts rabies during a pool party and turns aggressive. Lucy and friends barricade in pool, devising ways to survive the...
Ok, I’m convinced somebody was inspired after watching Gordy go apeshit in Nope during that flashback and decided “Yeah, I wanna make an entire horror movie surrounding that”. Regardless of inspiration or intention, “Primate” attempts to graft that Gordy meets Cujo hybrid framework into an ambitious B-movie survival flick that hits the gas running.
The operative word being "attempts."
Johanne Robert’s direction just screams ‘horizontal tunnel vision’ and his high-strung commitment to simplicity above all else flattens every scene into this myopic single lane approach that manifests a lot of static within the same visual register. He doesn’t build on nuance more than he warps the entire premise around it and wastes little time paying homage to Cujo and other 80’s creature features with an unpretentious, masochistic grin.
I think I distinctly remember tolerating most of Simon Bowles’s production design in previous movies; this one is more or less the same Similar to my worst film of last year (if you know, you know), this Hawaii-set glass-panned island house only looks Hawaiian in the most brochure-grazing manner possible despite being visually as impermanent and transient as a hotel room…yet his spatial choreography neither disguises the film's budgetary constraints nor elevates the cheap production values—it merely renders the cramped setting marginally believable. But the commitment to dressing up said limited space, however, can’t plaster over the essential blankness of the place; if anything, the more the film tries to assert the house as a character, the more it reveals how little the film has to say about its own setting.
Really, this presentation boasts more of an ill-maintained theme park vibe, a hastily assembled haunted house at a carnival than a proper horror movie attraction and the whole production carries that same ephemeral quality throughout. Stephen Murphy’s cinematography is a good example of this; on paper and in practice, its comfortably old-school between the adequate framing and the low contrast lighting barely giving proceedings a slightly dreamy haze, but it never fully commits to any distinct visual identity; either stark realism or genuine surrealism. The editing from Peter Gvozdas is slightly better but momentum comes and goes quickly.
For what’s supposed to be a breezy 89 minute runtime, the pacing doesn’t run as a high-octane cartoon; it stretches for time, lumbering forward with the urgency of cold molasses, creating a paradoxical experience where a movie about a rampaging chimp somehow manages to feel both rushed and interminable. Costume design leave absolutely no impression whatsoever, the film is incapable of sustaining any believable tension or suspense with the cast (unless you have a genuine fear of chimps like me) and the tone, oh god, the tone is every bit deliberately campy as it is ruthlessly mean-spirited; think Outer Banks teen comedy with the occasional flashes of jarring gross-out moments veered into splatter punk territory.
Every one of these scares are blatantly telegraphed, saved only by the hyper-violent traps and contrived death scenes, but even they exhaust themselves pretty quickly and simply resort to bashings. The visual effects for the creature design are more touch-and-go but feels realistic enough to pass (props for going practical, at least), Adrian Johnston’s syrupy electronic synth score screams B-movie from the opening frame to the credits, somehow managing to be both mind-numbingly repetitive and eerily effective in equal measure while the sound design in contrast stands head and shoulders above it…..and it goes without saying the R-rating is well-earned and fully exploited with gleeful indulgence.
As one might expect, the cast don’t have a lot of legs to stand on here; sure, they’re passable enough with what they’re given and nobody’s really phoning it in but all of them are bemusingly interchangeable as they jostle to wrestle pathos out of the underwritten proceedings. They’re feed rather insipid dialogue exchanges and on top of superficial character progression that feels more like checkbox ticking, my biggest pet peeve in horror regurgitates yet again: consistently dumb characters with shortsighted thinking that speaks to the degradation of common sense.
Troy Kotsur’s affable chemistry makes the brief family unit believable for a time and Johnny Sequoyah supplies this kind of laconicism that bolsters her performance and gives her character faint glimpses of color but they’re the exceptions, not the rule; just an absolute dearth of emotional investment that feels deliberately inconsequential.
So yeah, taking that entire two and a half minute sequence from Nope and making an entire horror movie out of it was definitely…..a choice and I could see only two ways they could make it work: tie it into a fascinating spiritual study on how detrimental human-primate relationships tend to be for our evolutionary cousins despite their appeal to us or just completely jettison that pretext in lieu of watching apes go wild for anybody desensitized to violence. Unsurprisingly, the path of least resistance was chosen, meaning this narrative doesn't try to pretend to say much about anything; no elaborate mythology, no dense backstory for why Ben goes bananas beyond rabies, no puzzle to solve and every sequence of events can be sniffed out from a mile away the literal second the film starts (with the exception of who bites it first). No point in mincing words: this script feels deliberately first-draft with whatever narrative cohesion is available being reverted to dust in the wind and the tiny threads of intrigue that it does have go completely kaput.
As much as the sheer brutality behind its violence lures people in, this enclosure is so artificial to the point of alienation—sacrificing the stunted drama for visceral shrieks that evaporates the second the high wears off. The film is, at least, well aware of how flimsy and shallow its premise is and immediately weaponizes it, stacking debasement upon debasement until the whole thing becomes a dare. But like a sugar rush that inevitably crashes, it only gets lazier the longer it carries on; the abundant clichés border on self-parody while contrivances pile up as much as the bodies do and it all culminates in an arbitrary climax that arrives with all the ceremony of a timecard being punched. That alone sells just how little the plot cares about consistency more than the individual moment-to-moment booking; yes, the very inclusion of ASL and a deaf supporting character added briefly to the realism, but once you consider the practicality of actually owning a chimp, as such a person, the plausibility of this entire situation wanes dramatically. I get this isn’t meant to be a smart script but between that, the egregious misinformation it spreads about chimpanzees and the ridiculous amount of plot armor the main family gets, the whole enterprise reeks of creative diffidence.
Think about it: this movie had barely enough imagination to find the lowest hanging fruit with tension and suspension of disbelief and even with that, it simply can’t decide the route it wants to go down: take the one-location drama without taking yourself too seriously. Just straight-up tonal whiplash and it doesn't make the dynamics any more or less interesting. Even though there is an innate tragedy to how this situation unfolded with Ben’s rapid turmoil and the desperation to cox the old him back, the film dangles between these two pendulums with no momentum, squandering every attempt at emotional devastation…..but then again, do you really care about any of these characters? What did you expect out of this?
Talk about a throwback: an ode to a simpler time where entertainment was the top priority above all else but unnatural to the point of emotional alienation, the desensitizing, campy fun “Primate” signs, seals and delivers doesn’t absolve it of repetitive nature, nor does it elevate the material beyond its bargain-basement aspirations.
