A house party turns into a massacre when a pet chimpanzee pet gets rabies.
I don’t want to say much about this one – and frankly, the film doesn’t give you much to work with beyond surface-level shocks.
The acting is competent across the board, but it’s squandered on characters that are either deeply unrelatable or actively unpleasant. Watching Troy Kotsur follow up an Oscar-winning performance in CODA (2021) with Primate feels like a genuine waste of talent, even if, according to IMDb, he enjoyed the experience. Enjoyment, however, does not translate into narrative value.
Co-writer/director Johannes Roberts made a film that leans heavily on casting enormously good-looking actresses – Johnny Sequoyah, Jess Alexander, and Victoria Wyant. But aesthetic appeal is not a substitute for character, motivation, or coherent writing. The main problem here is the script. Hawaii, being the only U.S. state without rabies, becomes a narrative crutch rather than an intelligent plot device. Even so, the film’s internal logic collapses quickly: chimpanzees may be poor swimmers, but they can swim, and if Ben were rabid, the resulting aggression would not conveniently discriminate between in- and out-of-water contexts. The film behaves as though biology bends to screenplay convenience, and it does so repeatedly (see also the closet scene).
The handling of captivity is equally absurd. Characters respond to confinement with such baffling stupidity that emotional investment becomes impossible. There is no tension because there is no empathy; the audience is never given a reason to care whether anyone survives.
Ironically, this works in the film’s favour during its more brutal moments. Ben himself, thanks to effective prosthetics, animatronics, and performance, is convincingly realised. The deaths are visceral and occasionally entertaining precisely because detachment reigns. If characters are going to die, they might as well do so spectacularly.
Lastly, the film’s central premise, keeping a chimpanzee as a pet, treating it as a toy, locking it in a cage, and waving a teddy bear to pacify it, is not provocative or tragic. It’s just moronic. That this arrangement predictably ends in violence is not shocking one bit, just inevitable.
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