One of the first movies to kick off 2026 in theaters, Primate is a ridiculous, gory good time, even if it doesn’t really do much you haven’t seen before.
Johnny Sequoyah stars as Lucy, who comes home to Hawaii with a group of friends looking to reconnect with her family and have some fun. One member of her family is Ben (Miguel Torres Umba), an intelligent chimpanzee that Lucy’s late mother taught sign language. Bitten by a rabid mongoose, Ben becomes highly aggressive and starts brutally attacking Lucy, her sister Erin (Gia Hunter), and her friends. It’s basically Cujo but with a chimp in a luxurious Hawaiian house. The movie moves along at an extremely brisk pace and is a breezy 89 minutes long. There isn’t a lot of time devoted to building up most of the characters in any interesting way, but that’s fine in a movie like this, as most of them are just cannon fodder for Ben to kill gruesomely. Speaking of which, gorehounds are going to love Primate, as there are some truly gnarly deaths, including faces getting ripped off, horrific bites, and more. The movie really sells the idea of just how freakishly strong chimps are, especially ones driven insane by rabies. Since Ben is portrayed mainly by an actor in a suit, it has the visceral feel you don’t get if Ben were, say, a Planet of the Apes-style all-CGI character. There are obviously some visual effects, but it’s mostly real, which is always welcome, especially in the horror genre.
The movie’s contained setting in a gorgeous cliffside Hawaiian home is interesting, but there’s a bizarre choice to have most of the movie take place with the characters trapped in the home’s cliffside pool. For plot reasons, it’s because rabies-infected animals fear water, and also, Ben cannot swim, but it gets a little tedious and repetitive even in a movie as brisk as this. Some of the most effective sequences occur when characters manage to escape and make it into the house, unsure whether Ben followed them. As mentioned, the characters are mostly there as bodies for Ben to rip apart, and any attempts at character development or relationship dynamics are at best thinly sketched. Oscar winner Troy Kotsur lends gravitas as Lucy and Erin’s father, who is away for most of the movie at a book signing, and he brings a spark that energizes the few scenes he’s in.
Primate is a fun and fast-paced creature feature that offers up plenty of gory kills, but doesn’t do anything to shake up the animal attack genre too much. It probably won’t end up on any Best of 2026 lists at the end of the year, but it is an entertaining way to kick off the year in theaters.
