Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Johannes Roberts
Starring: Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Troy Kotsur, Victoria Wyant, Gia Hunter, Benjamin Cheng, Charlie Mann
Before Bird Flu and COVID, the animal-spread disease we all lived in fear of was Rabies. I remember being terrified as a kid by the over-the-top TV spots that would play in the '80s warning us about this deadly terror. Some of my friends' parents wouldn't allow them to have dogs as pets because of their fear of contracting the disease. In the Western world at least, it was all hyperbole, the disease posing practically no substantial threat. That didn't stop fiction writers from exploiting the Rabies panic, with Stephen King's Cujo and its subsequent screen adaptation the most famous work to mine our fears of the disease. In the decades since, Rabies has largely disappeared from Western pop culture, but director Johannes Roberts has now brought it back to our screens in some style with Primate.
A throwback to video store faves like Link, Monkey Shines and Shakma, Primate is a good old-fashioned killer monkey thriller. Though shot on London soundstages, the movie is convincingly set in Hawaii, in an aspirational villa perched right on the edge of Chekhov's cliff. The Russian playwright famously laid down the dramatic proviso that if a cliff is introduced in the first act, a character must plummet to their death at some later point. It's no surprise then when one of Primate's red shirts meets their maker in such a manner. What is surprising is how gruesomely Roberts details their demise. This movie features the nastiest cliff death outside of a Lucio Fulci thriller, and that's just one of the commendably vicious deaths we witness during Primate's tight run time.
With his shark thriller 47 Metres Down and its follow-up, and his under-rated sequel The Strangers: Prey at Night, Roberts proved himself adept at constructing tense scenarios in confined locations. That's what we get once more, and like his shark thrillers, a big chunk of the action of Roberts' latest sees its main group of characters trapped in a body of water, in this case the aforementioned villa's swimming pool.
Technically known as Hydrophobia, Rabies causes its victims to develop an intense fear of water. Roberts and his co-writer Ernest Riera have latched onto this detail and built their film's main set-piece around this constraint. Flying home to Hawaii with some friends for the first time since the passing of her linguistics professor mother, Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) reunites with Ben, a chimpanzee her late mother trained to communicate via a speak and spell type tablet app. When poor old Ben gets bitten by a rabid mongoose, he turns violent, chasing Lucy and her friends into the pool, which he dare not enter (regardless of his newly developed fear of water, Ben can't swim).
Playing like a pun on Jaws 2's famous "just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water" tagline, Roberts manufactures much tension from characters daring to emerge from the safety of the pool to try and get their hands on the cellphones they've left inside the villa. Primate is smart enough to know that horror audiences are primed to call out any stupid decisions characters might make, and so Roberts has fun punishing his more simple-minded characters when their ill-thought out plans result in loss of face of both the literal and metaphorical variety. Roberts also knows that to a certain degree, audiences tend to root for the animal villains of such movies. With this in mind he has constructed his film in a way that makes us fear for some of the human characters while eagerly anticipating others to receive a painful death via a monkey's paw. A flaw of several recent horror movies and survival thrillers is that they have such small casts that their body counts are unsatisfyingly low. That's not the case here, with Roberts loading his film with potential victims.
Primate's plot may feature a dead parent, but it's refreshingly unconcerned with its final girl figure being fuelled by any lingering trauma. It rejects the over-used survival thriller cliché of a protagonist who needs to survive a potentially fatal scenario to resolve some personal issues. Lucy and co simply want to get through the night without having their faces torn off. Good enough! Instead, Roberts concentrates on fashioning suspenseful set-pieces, often employing unfashionable techniques like the fake POV, a favourite of John Carpenter, whose influence can also be seen in Roberts' use of negative space in the widescreen frame (not mention an explicit nod to Halloween when two characters hide out in a wardrobe).
Along with Roberts' fine technical filmmaking, Primate benefits from opting for a traditional man in a monkey suit (Miguel Torres Umba) rather than making Ben a purely digital creation. Even if Ben never quite looks like a real life chimp, having a performer occupy actual physical space makes the movie's kills all the more effective. Roberts has bucked modern trends here to give us an old school creature feature that delivers everything you could want from a b-movie. You'll be foaming at the mouth in anticipation of a sequel.
Primate is in UK/ROI cinemas from January 30th.
