There's an unspoken contract viewers make with every film. We agree to suspend disbelief to an extent and in return the movie does everything in its power to keep things entertaining enough that we never ask ourselves if any of this makes sense.
That's why Jaws terrifies, Birds feels only mildly hokey, and why nobody bats an eye when LL Cool J fights a shark in an oven in Deep Blue Sea.
Primate follows that long tradition of animal attack films where the plot barely matters and the science is w0bbly to say the least. It's a short and brutal experiment in stuffing as many kills into a single location as possible. But in its haste to get to the gore, it overlooks any semblance of character or setup necessary to make us care about the slaughter. As such, its scares are never scary and instead come off as cruel and rudimentary. You can easily guess the order in which our victims are dispatched, which turns the experience into a waiting game instead of anxious dread over your favorite character.
The setup is both simple and convoluted. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns home after a long time abroad to find her younger sister, Erin (Gia Hunter), and father Adam (Troy Kotsur) picking up the pieces after their mother passed away from cancer a year earlier. Said mother was also a linguistics professor who worked with primates to develop language learning tools with their help. One of these subjects, a chimpanzee named Ben, lives with the family as something akin to a brother. There's an insinuation this language training was partially to accommodate Adam, a deaf person working as a struggling sci-fi author.
Is any of this backstory necessary? Not in the least, and it doesn't come up again at any point in the story after a pointlessly long buildup. In fact, the only thing the story really needs is the opening preamble, which it delivers in a shocking and gruesome opening scene where an already rabies-infected Ben attacks his handler. That alone would suffice, but instead we're forced to sit through clunky exposition and thin characterization that is as dull as it is forgettable.
The gimmick is that Ben is bitten by a rabies-infected mongoose, which immediately turns him from sweet pet to a sinister Michael Myers -type serial killer who stalks his adopted family in their isolated luxury home. Why he does this is a mystery, especially as he has an entire jungle and open city nearby to explore. There is an implication that this is a personal vendetta, which for a moment signals a promise of a far more interesting film, but it goes nowhere.
If Primate were a funnier movie, it could make the ridiculousness work in its favor. But it plays the situation so seriously that even a setpiece involving a locked car and a rampaging simian with a clicker comes off as a third-rate Jurassic Park riff instead of something truly inventive. Most of the sequences suffer from the same familiarity, such as obvious visual references to The Shining or Alien 3, and apart from the horrific opening scene there aren't any original scares that would help Primate stand out on its own.
It's here that contract between viewer and film should come into effect. Yet Primate does so little with the initial premise that the lulls allow for the mind to wander. Most of the film is spent in a cornered pool where our victims seek refuge, as Ben can't swim and is deathly afraid of water due to his rabies. The protagonists need a phone to call for help, but Ben keeps guard at the edge of the pool. Instead of utilizing the established house, Primate settles for just the pool and the pool alone.
With the action confined to a single location, I began to ask questions like "why wouldn't Ben just climb over to the other side?" or "how does Ben understand the concept of calling 911?". When one of the characters was caught by total surprise that Ben, a chimpanzee, had climbed up to a higher level to set a trap, I checked out entirely. The monkey we've raised has the ability to climb things, who could have guessed!
The gore is passable, though more invested in the shock value of violence than it is in the emotion of losing a protagonist we care about. Ben, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. Some shots look terrifying, others are very clearly a guy in a suit and appear just as silly. Because he's just an instrument of violence, there's little character we can project on the tragic villain. He exists to kill and be killed, which makes the threat itself boring.
It's only thanks to a dedicated performance from Johnny Sequoyah that Primate works in small doses. She sells the fear and absurdity of the situation brilliantly, especially in lingering close-ups where we have to imagine all the terror she sees off-camera. It's great acting that deserves a better film.
The realm of great animal attack horror films isn't particularly vast, especially once you remove all the shark movies from that list. Primate deserves credit for allowing the naturally terrifying chimpanzees a moment to shine, but it's equally disappointing in how little it gets out of such fertile ground. Those seeking better land-based horror should seek out films like The Ghost and the Darkness, Beast, or Razorback. Sadly, none of them feature monkeys.
