DISCLAIMER: This review does not include major spoilers.
Ever since I first heard the story of Travis, I’ve gone through life with an intense fear of chimpanzees.
Travis was an abused and morbidly obese domestic chimpanzee owned by Sandra Herold, who lashed out and brutally mauled Charla Nash to near death in 2009. Within just 6 minutes, Travis managed to fully remove Nash’s hands, nose, lips, and eyelids. Nash required a full face and hand transplant, and still suffers from medical complications related to the attack to this day.
For me, I believe it’s just the spontaneity and brutality of it all. One second, this monkey is your friend, an almost human member of your family that you love like a son– and the next you’re dead.
The 2026 film PRIMATE, directed and co-written by Johannes Roberts, perfectly captures this fear.
PRIMATE follows the story of a family who meets the consequences of household chimpanzee ownership. The main character, whose name I have forgotten, due to every character’s irrelevance in this film, is a student returning to her home and her pet chimpanzee, Benji, in Hawaii from an undisclosed location. Kate (I looked it up) brings several of her friends with her to her massive shorefront beach house, where Benji proceeds to go on an all-night-long brutal rampage, either murdering or deeply wounding every person in the house.
Quickly into the film, it’s established that Ben’s behavior is caused by his affliction with the rabies virus, which does not exist in Hawaii, and which the movie acknowledges and simultaneously does not explain. PRIMATE is absolutely littered with simple plot holes such as this, but there’s a specific reason for those plot holes, which is absolutely why I loved this film.
Creating a cohesive and interesting story requires time. In a movie with an 89-minute runtime, Roberts forgoes the simple storytelling aspects of “plot” and “theme” and “character development” to dedicate as much time as possible to brutal chimpanzee violence.
The reason that decision makes this movie so great? Brutal chimpanzee violence is exactly what I signed up for.
Now, yes, while I was watching, I did regret my decision to come and see this movie. But not out of boredom, the typical reason people regret buying a movie ticket, but out of pure fear.
Truly, “PRIMATE” had me glued to my seat in a way no other film has. Usually, when watching a movie, I refill my Cherry Vanilla Coke, the best flavor, at least once. For this film, I didn’t take one sip. You, as the viewer, are immediately thrust into never-ending suspense and action.
Although my experience with this movie, as a proud chimpatsiphobiac (Yes, it’s a real word), may vastly differ from yours as a normal person, I believe there’s no way to watch this film without at least feeling the slightest bit mortified. The gore in this movie is unlike anything I have ever seen in a blockbuster feature film. Every character who dies does so in the most horrific and unfathomable ways.
Although Ben’s strength is greatly exaggerated for the movie, what makes PRIMATE truly horrifying is the plausibility of it all. If you were to edit the film and reskin Ben to Michael Myers, and title it as yet another Halloween sequel, it would lose all of its charm immediately. It’s rare that a horror film uses both a unique and realistic source of fear, but PRIMATE executes it perfectly.
Despite PRIMATE ‘s remarkable writing flaws, it does something most movies nowadays don’t. It does its job. PRIMATE is made to scare you, and it absolutely will.
Earlier in this review, when I said that PRIMATE lacked a theme, I lied. There is a very clear theme to this movie:
Don’t get a pet chimpanzee!
