Right away, Johannes Roberts’ Primate wears its influencse on its sleeve. Introducing the film at its Fantastic Fest world premiere, Roberts himself highlighted the work of Stephen King and John Carpenter as influences, and within minutes that was crystal clear to an opening night audience eager for creature feature fun.
Roberts’ homage to King’s Cujo, with lots of notes of Carpenter’s Halloween, Primate is at its best when it’s leaning into the wild animal attack popcorn flick elements of its story. The more unhinged it gets, the more fun it is to watch. It takes a while to get there, and it’s not always able to sustain the constant tension it aims for, but if you want a wild ride with a killer chimp, it’s got the goods.
Johnny Sequoyah stars as Lucy, who’s heading home to Hawaii after finals to spend time with her little sister (Gia Hunter), her best friend (Victoria Wyant), and her father (Troy Kotsur), who’s more concerned with his book tour than his daughters. Though she’s hoping to spend time with her Dad at some point, Lucy’s also happy to relax at the family’s cliffside home with her sister, her friends, and of course Ben, the supremely intelligent chimpanzee who was the subject of her mother’s studies for many years.
Ben’s another member of the family, beloved by Lucy and her sister, more of a little brother than a pet, but he hasn’t been feeling well lately, and he’s agitated, so he stays in his enclosure while the kids party. What none of them know, of course, is that Ben has been infected with rabies, and he’s about to make their weekend a living hell.
Aside from a rather fun opening kill to kickstart the proceedings, the first act of all of this proceeds in a rather formulaic way. Lucy’s missed her sister, she’s worried about her Dad, she loves her friends, she’s got a crush, and of course she longs for the time when her family was intact, when that’s what mattered to everyone. The horror element of the film is telegraphed by the title, by an opening note explaining rabies, and by that first kill, so you’re really just left to wait and see how this will all work when the hammer comes down. That makes parts of the opening minutes a bit of a chore, but when that hammer finally drops, that’s when Primate shines.
For a good chunk of its runtime, and I really don’t think this is a spoiler though trailers for the film have not yet arrived, Primate is Cujo in a swimming pool. Lucy’s dad is gone, Ben is rampaging, and the pool is the only safe place from the chimp’s hydrophobic madness. Like the Stephen King classic before it, the film becomes a survival horror gauntlet, as the survivors try to get hold of cell phones, improvise weapons, and do their best to survive an increasingly unhinged night.
In these moments, the best of Roberts’ direction (he also co-wrote the film) comes through. This is the Johannes Roberts who gave us 47 Meters Down and The Strangers: Prey at Night, taking a back-to-basics approach to sustained tension and release horror filmmaking. The jump scares are effective, and the gore effects, which lean heavily on the practical, are very fun, but it’s the tension that really makes it all work. Whether he’s setting up a daring cell phone heist or playing with louvered doors in a scene lovingly lifted from Halloween, this is Roberts taking things as old-school as he can, and it works.
It also works because everyone involved is game for what’s about to happen to them. So many movies with this kind of premise aim for a level of camp that places the film in deliberately meme-able, “so bad it’s good” territory, and while that’s its own kind of fun, sincerity goes a long way. This cast, led by Sequoyah and featuring scene-stealing work from Kotsur and Jessica Alexander, is fully committed to the killer chimp idea at the heart of the film, in the same way that the cast of something like Jurassic Park or Anaconda leaned all the way into their respective animal predicaments
Now, I’m not saying Primate is Jurassic Park, by any means, but no one set out to make a Good-Bad movie here. They set out to make a blast of an entry in the animal attack genre, and some bumps in the road aside, they succeeded. Primate‘s story beats are familiar. Its filmmaking tricks and techniques are well-worn. Its script is predictable to anyone who knows this subgenre. But in the end, when you see this movie with a crowd primed for popcorn horror, none of that matters. It’s just fun, and audiences will have a blast with it when it hits theaters in early 2026.
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