M3GAN is dead, long live Monkey. In 2022, Gerard Johnstone’s yassified murder doll injected new life into the January horror canon, TikTok dancing across the line of camp and slop with enough finesse to earn its budget back tenfold. But M3GAN 2.0’s flop left a void for everyone still hungry for silver-screen brain drains to get them through the cold months. Enter Primate. As with M3GAN, Johannes Roberts’ simian rampage flick boasts an irresistibly simple and stupid elevator pitch: Monkey lives with people; monkey gets rabies; monkey kills people. Combined with a slick, 89-minute runtime and a Charli XCX needle drop for good measure, Primate fits the bill for anyone hoping to tune in, turn on, and chuckle while the fur flies.
Primate’s plot — beyond murder monkey — is threadbare, a little flimsy, but serviceable nonetheless. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) is a college-aged young adult returning to her home in Hawaii with two mainland pals in tow: best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and frenemy Hannah (Jessica Alexander). The latter is shocked by the time she gets to Lucy’s house: not only by its staggering cliffside views and infinity pool, but by Ben, a cuddly chimpanzee once kept by Lucy’s late mother (a scientist, naturally). Now, Ben is a member of the family, and Lucy’s father (Adam, played by Coda’s Troy Kotsur) serves as his caretaker. Adam is an author; he’s also deaf, and sign language complements Ben’s touchpad language app to elevate Ben from a pet to something closer to a family member.
Primate is mercifully efficient with its table setting. Once his daughter arrives, Adam is out the door for a book tour, leaving the girls with a free house for partying… and Ben with a rabid mongoose in his enclosure. Ben, of course, steals the show. He’s played by actor and movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba and rendered with admirably little CGI; you’ll never be fooled into thinking you’re watching a real monkey, but it’s a relief to see the girls cower in front of a corporeal beast instead of a tennis ball on a stick. Ben swings across the uncanny valley like a vine. He’s cute enough for us to understand why Lucy’s little sister (Gia Hunter) lets him share her bed, but even before the mongoose bite, a darkness hangs under his brow like a thick fog. Hannah, for all her mean-girl panache, might be onto something.
Roberts’ movie proves to be a miracle of location scouting, and when Ben turns, the house turns, too. Ben can’t swim, and as his initial post-bite quirks congeal into primal bloodthirst, the girls take to the infinity pool for safety. As an opening card explains, rabies leaves its victims with hydrophobia, and Ben’s mania spikes with each lap around his just-out-of-reach prey. The monkey map here is as claustrophobic as it is beautiful: Ben smashes his way through the loft house’s bay windows, slams his fists through flatscreens, and keeps the kids trapped between salvation — two cars sit so close in the driveway! — and, as one of Lucy’s friends discovers, a careening death over the infinity pool’s cliff.
Like with the monkey’s design, Primate’s violence is practical-forward and frequently horrifying. Heads are defaced and smashed, limbs are ripped apart, scalps and jaws are torn off bodies like so many banana peels. Each kill feels considered and inspired, and gurgles with enough blood to make you squirm in your seat — Primate might never reach the heights of Evil Dead, but it’s hard not to still feel Sam Raimi in the loose eyeballs of it all. Death here dribbles in consistently with Primate’s well-oiled rhythms, scored like a globalist John Carpenter by Adrian Johnston, whose synth-and-drum marches bubble up like open arteries, daring the girls out of the pool and into the monkey’s paw. It’s a propulsive touch that makes Primate’s already forgiving runtime fly by all the faster.
There’s a distinct satisfaction in watching something that knows what it is without winking at its audience. Primate passes a handful of avenues toward elevation — the grief of Lucy’s late mother, the distance between her and her workaholic father — but it’s lean enough to never take the bait. Nor does the movie deign to waste its audience’s time. You bought the ticket to see a monkey go nuts, and Roberts’ only goal seems to be delivering on that promise. Primate is light enough to risk a future of bouncing from streamer to streamer to collect a handful of plays at a time, but maybe that’s okay. Every generation needs its Cujo.
DIRECTOR: Johannes Roberts; CAST: Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Troy Kotsur, Victoria Wyant, Gia Hunter; DISTRIBUTOR: Paramount Pictures; IN THEATERS: January 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
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