Review: Primate

Director:  Johannes Roberts

Stars:  Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Troy Kotsur

Johannes Roberts is one of those directors I always want to show up for, a level of goodwill that primarily goes back to his expectation-beating, streamlined slasher The Strangers: Prey at Night (still the highwater mark of that yo-yoing franchise). But Roberts hasn’t made it easy. As much fun as I had with the schlocky 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, things truly came undone with his muddled Resident Evil rehash. Prior to that, Roberts had been working at a respectable clip, knocking out a semi-decent B-movie every year or so. The four year gap between Welcome to Racoon City and Primate suggests he’s taken time to regroup and rethink.

In that time, perhaps he and co-writer Ernest Riera went to the movies and saw Jordan Peele’s Nope. That film had within it an exceptionally tense sequence of a chimpanzee going berserk on the set of a sitcom; a curious but still thematically resonant aside in Peele’s sprawling sci-fi western. One can almost imagine these two watching it, cogs turning in unison as they looked at one another. What if that tension could sustain a whole movie? Cujo but with Caesar from Planet of the Apes?

It’s a neat enough premise, and the resulting high-concept horror flick certainly doesn’t skimp on the nasty and bestial, but Primate has as much to lament as it does to laud. There are too many inexplicable occurrences. Too little characterisation. And through this a paucity of reasons to care about the carnage that ensues over the course of a very long night at a remote luxury home on a Hawaiian cliff top. 

Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) is returning to said home from college with her pals Kate (Victoria Wyant), Nick (Benjamin Cheng) and Hannah (Jessica Alexander) in tow. Family comes in the form of little sister Erin (Gia Hunter), deaf patriarch and wildlife expert Adam (Troy Kotsur)… and domesticated chimp Ben (Miguel Hernando Torres Umba). Ben has an enclosure annexed to the house, but is usually free to roam around the property as he chooses. With the house freshly repopulated with college kids looking to unwind, Adam locks Ben up in his enclosure. But when Ben is bitten by a rabid mongoose (the appearance of which on the otherwise totally rabies-free isles is left naggingly unexplained), the disease goes into hyperdrive, transforming him overnight into a slobbering, homicidal menace. There maybe be no contingencies in place for a non-native disease, but there’s seemingly no other safeguards (like, say, a tranquiliser gun) lying around either. And wouldn’t you know it, Adam’s driven off to a book signing, leaving the kids unsupervised.

Come the end of the picture, Roberts and Riera realise that the familial trio is the movie’s true emotional core, and in this late phase Primate manages to up it’s game, but unfortunately that intensity is a long time coming. For much of the picture we’re saddled with the most basic and interchangeable set of college kids since the I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot. Personalities are not a pre-requisite. The same, sadly, goes for Ben, whom we don’t get much of a feel for one way or the other before he’s turned feral. With little cause to feel invested, what unfurls is occasionally fun, but more often just grisly chaos. As Ben is unable to swim, the surviving kids take refuge in the property’s (wildly unsafe) luxury pool, their menace prowling and snatching at them from the edges. It amounts to a kind of inverse-Jaws and we languish there for a good third of the running time.

Whenever we get away from this relative safety zone, things get more engaging, but even then there are plenty of reasons to become irked. Everyone’s barefoot, but a plethora of broken glass is treated as bafflingly benign and immaterial… until it isn’t. With everyone on the same page about keeping quiet and moving quickly, there are too many instances of characters frozen in slack-jawed stupidity when a swift reaction would get them out of a jam. What may have been intended to amp up tension often just increases viewer frustration. Roberts might’ve gotten away with these snafus if we knew these people better and were inclined to give them a pass or two. 

There’s a decent smattering of schadenfreude when two dopey fuckboys drop by to pump-up the body count, but ingenuity is still hard to come by. Most of the time, the most obvious thing is the thing that happens. Granted, as things go on, Roberts dials up the darkly humorous elements, but the overkill makes this feel more mean-spirited than audience inclusive. It’s not until that late-in-the-day family reunion that Roberts gets the mixture right. But it’s still a shade too late and a mite too unpleasant. Primate just doesn’t feel like one to instinctively reach for as a comfort re-watch months down the line. There’s little reason to revisit what is, ostensibly, just a nasty time. And the ill-thought-out elements kinda seal its fate. 

A big step in the right direction after Welcome to Racoon City it may be, but Primate isn’t quite the all-out redeemer we could’ve hoped for.