Vague Visages’ Primate review contains minor spoilers. Johannes Roberts’ 2025 movie features Johnny Sequoyah, Jess Alexander and Troy Kotsur. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Creature features typically focus on water-based animals, which makes it considerably easier for the filmmakers to convincingly convey their attacks onscreen. Aside from the underrated Idris Elba-punches-a-lion movie, Beast (2022), it’s been a long time since a land-based foe tore a group of unsuspecting characters to pieces. Director Johannes Roberts (2017’s 47 Meters Down, 2018’s The Strangers: Prey at Night) seems keenly aware of this fact. His latest feature, Primate, goes for the jugular right from its opening in media res sequence. The fact that it features a beloved character actor undergoing a truly horrific death — one that includes impressively gruesome makeup and practical FX — further solidifies that Roberts is not messing around.

Primate’s story then flashes back to 36 hours prior as Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), her BFF Kate (Victoria Wyant) and brassy tagalong Hannah (Jess Alexander) board a plane to Hawaii — the hometown of Kate and where her deaf father, Adam (Troy Kotsur, star of the 2021 film CODA), and younger sister, Erin (Gia Hunter), still reside. Their cliffside abode is a stunning, mostly-glass mansion — the kind of location that likely made the filmmakers kiss the ground when they discovered it. The house is also filled with memories of Kate and Erin’s dearly departed mother, a primate expert who recently passed away following a battle with cancer. Adam, meanwhile, is a successful novelist who’s in the middle of negotiating a movie adaptation of one of his books, leaving the girls alone for a couple of nights.

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Naturally, though, Kate and Erin’s aren’t completely alone. The family’s pet chimp, Ben (winningly portrayed, in an animatronic suit, by creature performer Miguel Torres Umba), is also there, initially introduced as his hand creepily crawls up Erin’s back and over her shoulder — a cleverly eerie hint that he’s more of a threat than the girls realize. It doesn’t take long for poor Ben to start frothing at the mouth and attacking the very humans he once considered family, eventually stranding the foursome in a pool after taking a massive chunk out of Erin’s leg. Everybody is fair game to Ben, and the body count is increased by a couple of dude-bros stumbling through the house drunkenly, after meeting the main characters on a plane and being invited over to party with them.

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Primate really goes there, which is a rarity in studio horror. The deaths are vicious, nasty and brutal via sustained violence, as there’s absolutely no cutting back to the safe characters to give viewers some respite. The camera locks in tight on whoever Ben has turned his attention to and keeps the focus on them as he methodically and ruthlessly tears them apart. There are a handful of soon-to-be all-timer set-pieces in Primate, from the aforementioned opening sequence, which, without spoiling anything, gives fans what they’d expect from a movie about a killer chimp, to a horrific bedroom-set attack that’s all the more effective because of how deliberately it’s paced, and finally a scene set almost entirely in a car that builds to breaking point before unleashing some truly horrific carnage.

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The temptation to go campy in Primate must have been enormous, but Roberts — who co-wrote the script with Ernest Riera — plays it straight, building an intensity that rarely lets up. The film starts off on relatively dodgy footing, with the airplane sequence standing out as being overwritten. The young actors are tasked with believably delivering lines with one too many words, like a random “okay” stuck at the end of a sentence to turn it into a question, for instance. It makes Primate feel disjointed, like the rhythm is off, or even that the mostly unknown performers aren’t up to scratch. Fortunately, once everybody is situated in the house, where most of the action takes place, Primate settles down, allowing the cast to shine as they run and scream for their lives without any cringeworthy dialogue.

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Usually, it’s relatively easy to pinpoint who’s most likely to survive these kinds of movies, sapping them of much-needed tension. But there are a couple of deaths that are so shocking and impossible to predict that they set Primate apart from practically every other mainstream horror movie of the last few years, including heavy-hitters like Weapons (2025). It doesn’t necessarily ruin a movie when it’s obvious who’s bound to survive, but the idea that anybody could perish at any point gives Primate a palpable and propulsive sense of danger. Using a classic man-in-suit rather than relying on dodgy CGI ensures the movie’s tactility too. Ben is, quite literally, really there in the scene, which further helps elevate this beyond something like the recent, execrable Killer Whale (2026), whose totally unconvincing titular creature is the least of its worries but certainly doesn’t help sell the wishy-washy story.

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The central group fear is also tangible in Primate. The mostly female cast sells their horrifying predicament in every bloodcurdling moment, whether they’re floating in the pool, hiding in a closet or making a run for it. Horror movies fall apart once it becomes clear that there’s an easy solution to the problem, or an obvious exit plan, but Primate keeps the audience on its toes by making it increasingly difficult for the central foursome to gain any sort of leverage over Ben. As such, the movie is the very definition of “edge of your seat,” despite how cliché that term has become. It rarely lets up, even despite some well-placed humor. Playing it straight was a big risk, but Roberts understands that being mean, an approach that he took with 47 Meters Down, makes people pay attention more than dodgy meta jokes.

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It’s tough not to overstate just how delightfully cruel Primate is without giving away its most horrific moments, but let’s just say that this is some serious stuff. Although the premise is relatively trashy, Roberts and his co-writer clearly have the wherewithal not to succumb to their basest instincts. The flesh may fly but nobody dies half-naked. In fact, one of the most standout sequences subverts how female characters are typically held down and brutalized by masked assailants, by putting a man in that vulnerable position instead. It may sound like a minor decision, but it’s a step in the right direction for representation in horror, where women still routinely suffer considerably worse fates than their male counterparts, regardless of whether they’re the protagonists.

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Primate is a bit like that memorably gruesome sequence in Nope (2022) stretched out to feature length, but it’s smarter, meaner and more inventive. The decision to present Ben practically instantly elevates the film from shlocky B-movie fare to one of the most effective modern creature features to date, while the kills are exceptionally, cover-your-eyes-with-your-hands horrific. Taken as yet another example of why practical is always preferable, Primate is a real winner. But, considering it simply as a horror movie that aims to scare and delight audiences, it’s near-perfect.

Primate released theatrically on January 9, 2026.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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