Toronto After Dark 2025 Review: PRIMATE, A Lean and Mean Creature Feature
“Who keeps a chimpanzee as a pet?” muses an unsuspecting, blandly attractive 20-something party-boy, right before he has his face ripped off, quite graphically, for daring to ask such a question about the movie he has found himself in.
First and foremost, Primate is interested in its technical craft. Animal-logic and human character development remain mostly perfunctory in favour of the execution of a series of suspenseful horror set-pieces, maximum use of its swanky production design, superbly-gory practical effects, and shock sound design. Boy oh boy, does this film squeeze maximum monkey hollers out of every high frequency Dolby channel.
Returning to her parents' spectacular cliff-side mansion in the Hawaiian mountains with a couple of her girlfriends in tow, Lucy is looking forward to spending some time with her sister and her recently widowed workaholic father, while also getting some partying in on the side. Her recently passed mother (nothing suspicious, just plain old cancer) was a celebrity ecologist in the vein of Jane Goodall, whose key student, Ben, a young chimp who has become more of a family member than research subject after her passing.
Ben sleeps in a Jurassic Park (“clever girl”) kind of cage located on the property, but mostly has free run of the house and grounds. He communicates by gentle handshakes, strictly obeys an ear-piercing whistle, and occasionally uses a computer tablet to verbalize a few phrases in a retro, if ominous, speak-and-spell voice. All of this goes rapidly off any family pet guard-rails when Ben gets bitten by a rabid animal. Any housebroken behaviour goes out the window, and over the rocky precipice, as the primal urge to rip everything to pieces overrides whatever domestic conditioning and human bonding was cultivated over his time spent with Lucy, her younger sister Erin, and their folks in the past.
Proudly broadcasting its love of 1980s John Carpenter siege and slasher dynamics as well as Stephen King's ‘when animals attack’ classics (Cujo, Sleepwalkers, Pet Semetary) director Johannes Roberts squeezes as many tricks and tropes of both genres into the mix as its lean 90 minutes will allow.
Lucy’s deaf father (Coda’s Troy Kotsur, linen clad and delightfully crunchy) offers both the present/absent dad, as well as sign language and not-hearing opportunities. The best-friends and sisters-forever gets some half-hearted mileage. Other ancillary characters that pop by or call into the home, from the veterinarian to a medical technician, as well as a few shirtless teen-beat boys, act as a steady stream of Return of the Living Dead (or Dead Alive) style fodder for Ben’s rampage. Face ripping and inventive kills ensue.
No stranger to animal siege films, having directed both 47 Meters Down films, Roberts passion here lays clearly with what Ben is capable of in this space, even as the film’s point of view is (ostensibly) the girls' survival. Ben as a creature design is a marvel unto himself. A mixture of man-in-suit, puppeteering, and animatronics, all blended together with state of the art craft and care in a way that hits (figuratively and literally) different than Toby Kebbell or Andy Serkis in digital motion capture CGI war-paint. Primate puts Ben behind frosted glass, sheer curtains, slatted closet doors, and even from the point of view from underwater, and deeply loves shadowy close-ups of his face, or quiet wanderings into the background of a frame to great horror effect.
The large home, built on sound-stage in London, never feels like it it is not in Hawaii, and serves as the primary location for nearly the entirety of the picture. It is both magnificent, mundane, and preposterous in equal measure: A perfect 21st century Zillow-cum-VRBO parody, with its infinity pool on the edge of a 200 foot sheet drop, nouveau riche suburban living quarters, and Survivor-esque fire-lit subterranean professional space, providing a lot of jungle-gym of opportunity for Ben to wreak havoc.
The device that chimps cannot swim makes the pool the beating heart of the situation. Not every idea lands perfectly, but its ratio of hits to misses, around such a fountain of ideas and opportunities, would make Roberts an all-star hitter in baseball terms.
Why a rabid chimp chooses to do what he does in this fashion, favouring curated terror over primal instinct, is anyone’s guess, though. Do not ask such questions. (Remember, above?)
Rather the entire scenario becomes an opportunity to bring the casually broken family back together in a just-savage-enough way to get a fist pump here or there, while still surprising the audience, in that Deep Blue Sea kind of way, on who will live and who will die, and when. I hope those that do all get their shots together, after this one.
Primate is some pretty glorious fan (as in Fangoria) service with a generous budget from Paramount, without the requisite smoothing off of its sharp edges most studios demand. It almost feels like Roberts got away with something here, and is giddy about it. Those who love this kind of lean and mean creature feature, one with a grim and ridiculous sense of humour, should be very pleased with the results. This kind of thing is something of a rare bird these days, in the space of endless franchises and remakes, or the so-called ‘elevated horror’ from the likes of Neon and A24. Yea, it is nostalgia for a bygone era of filmmaking, but it is done with a dash contemporary flair.
