Primate

The Beast in the Living Room

I’m worn out by horror movies that strain to be about "trauma." You know the type: gray, solemn, full of grief-as-metaphor, with characters who sound like they swallowed an online therapy thread. Sometimes a violent animal is just a violent animal. Johannes Roberts, thankfully, seems to understand that. The director of *47 Meters Down* swaps sharks for a rabid chimpanzee in *Primate*, and the result is gloriously uninterested in prestige-horror posturing. It doesn’t want to reinvent anything. It just wants to lunge straight at your throat.



The setup is blunt in the best possible way. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) heads back to her luxurious Hawaiian cliffside home with friends for what should be an easy, sun-soaked college break. Waiting there are her widowed father, Adam, and the family’s adopted chimpanzee, Ben. Lucy’s late mother, a linguistics professor, taught Ben to communicate through sign language and a digital tablet. Then Ben gets bitten by a rabid mongoose, and that’s the movie. The plot is paper-thin, sure, but that barely matters once the mayhem starts. What sells it is how physical the danger feels. At a time when audiences are used to the polished CGI apes of the *Planet of the Apes* movies, Roberts goes practical. Ben is played by movement actor Miguel Torres Umba in a prosthetic suit, and that choice gives the film its bite. He has mass. He has menace. When he moves through a dark room, it feels like something heavy and real has entered the space with you.



Roberts has always been good with space, and he gets a lot out of this big, exposed, glass-walled house. But the smartest thing he does here is with sound. Adam is played by Troy Kotsur, bringing the same lived-in warmth that made him unforgettable in *CODA*, and the film occasionally drops us into his deaf perspective. There’s one sequence in the second act that really lands: the sounds of the Hawaiian night vanish completely, and we’re stuck in Adam’s silent field of vision just as the chimp slips into frame. It’s nasty, simple, effective suspense. Lucy’s college friends are mostly sketched as future body count, which is fine, but Kotsur gives the whole thing a center of gravity. He makes the absurdity feel human.



I’m not going to oversell it as flawless. The first act lingers too long on a limp little love triangle the script forgets the minute things turn violent. But once the film finally gets moving, it knows exactly what kind of nasty fun it wants to be. *The Guardian*’s Benjamin Lee got at the appeal when he called it a "straight-to-the-point riposte to the glum, trauma-heavy horror films we’ve been enduring of late." That’s it. *Primate* is lean, mean, and happy to let its killer be a hairy, furious animal with a communication tablet and no interest in symbolism. It’s a useful reminder that nature doesn’t care about our nice homes or our attempts to domesticate it. It just tears back.