Primate: A Review

Image courtesy of Paramount

In an attempt to escape the reality of returning back to a second semester of course shopping, homework assignments, and club interviews, I decided to go to an AMC theater and catch a decent movie. I landed on the film Primate, which I hoped would give me some gruesome jumpscares. The movie’s plot centers around Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a college student who brings her friends to her house in Hawaii after being away for a few years. There, all her friends are introduced to Ben (Miguel Hernando Torres Umba), an intelligent pet ape that the family has raised. After a mongoose bites Ben and makes him contract rabies, Ben starts to have violent tendencies. Stranded in the house with a killer ape, Lucy, her sister Erin (Gia Hunter), and her friends must find a way to make it out alive.

The true foundation for this movie was the richness of the relationships the characters had with one another. I loved seeing Lucy and Erin’s relationship as sisters develop over the course of the movie, especially after the initial tension established between them due to Lucy’s time away from home. Additionally, in the final moments leading up to Ben’s death, it was powerful to see Lucy push Erin and her dad away from Ben’s line of attack in an act of sacrifice. I also found Hannah (Jessica Alexander), a friend of a friend of Lucy’s who was invited without warning, to be a particularly interesting character despite how polarizing she was in the beginning. Early on, it is evident that Lucy and Hannah do not get along because Hannah is essentially crashing the weekend getaway they had planned. It doesn’t help that Hannah hits on Nick (Benjamin Cheng), the guy that Erin has had a crush on since she was a kid. However, Lucy and Hannah are able to build a better relationship through the shared situation they’re in, and Hannah proves to be a badass when it comes to fighting off Ben. I found the decision to make the father (Troy Kotsur) deaf artistically satisfying. The horrifying, intense scenes of screams and loud bashing of human heads was juxtaposed with the completely silent scenes in the dad’s point of view. This detail underscored Ben’s wild, aggressive nature while also laying out a suspenseful framework for the father’s fate as he returns back to the house. 

Moreover, the filmmakers did not hold back when they labeled this film as a horror movie. From Nick's head being split open after being pushed off a cliff to Ben ripping off the face of his veterinarian, Dr. Dough Lambert (Rob Delaney), the filmmakers were practically begging the audience to turn away from these scenes for their mental wellbeing. This film was set on buying into the intense horror genre, with the most notable scene being Ben savagely ripping out the jaw of one of the side characters. I think the movie could have easily added another layer if they spent more time at the beginning of the film to formulate Ben’s relationship with Lucy, Erin, and Adam. The entire movie, I was just waiting (and praying) that Ben would fall off a cliff or get shot. I wished there was more nuance in how I felt about Ben. If the screenwriters had included more scenes of Ben’s friendly nature before he contracted rabies, that would have allowed me to sympathize with Ben, even for a moment, which would have elevated my own movie watching experience through this contradiction. In all honesty, the film didn’t need to include the rabies aspect because I would have believed that Ben would become violent purely on the basis that he’s a wild animal. It is evident that the filmmakers forgot that Ben is still an actual character in the film that needs character development.

Image courtesy of Paramount

We learn early on that the mother of Lucy and Erin, whose work was research on chimpanzees like Ben, died prematurely due to cancer. However, this fact was glossed over and the screenwriters failed to dive any deeper into the mother’s research or her relationship with Ben. While I appreciate that the film didn’t dwell too much on the backstory and jumped straight into the horror, what separates a mediocre film from a great film is the building blocks of the world that the audience is viewing. This connects back to my previous critique on Ben as a character instead of a killing machine. If a nurturing relationship with Ben and the mother was previously established, I would have had an array of different emotions when watching the film as opposed to pure hatred (and fear) of Ben. A good villain is one that makes the audience feel conflicting emotions, and I did not feel that this film achieved that. 

If I had one quote that could perfectly encapsulate the essence of this film, it would be “play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” I can’t fathom the idea that you would have a wild animal as a pet and not have any sort of safety precautions in place—such as a gun in the house. The film checks all the boxes of the typical horror movie genre (young cast, killer, one house, no escape), making it a solid horror movie. After doing my research after seeing Primate, I did notice that this was one of the few horror films that focuses on a killer animal (some of the other big ones being Cujo and Jaws). While this movie had its fair share of flaws, it serves as a stepping stone to an intriguing emerging subgenre of horror in the film industry.

Nicole Au is a freshman at Columbia University studying Psychology and Film. When not sharing her love of film, she likes to bake, paint, find new food spots in the city, or do jigsaw puzzles. While a cinephile, she especially loves all movies starring Tom Hanks or Leonardo DiCaprio.