Skip to content

Sign in

Movie

Primate

2025

Lucy returns to her family’s home in Hawaii for a vacation with friends, hoping to reconnect with her family and enjoy some time away. Waiting for her is Ben, the family’s pet chimpanzee, who has been raised alongside them and is treated as a member of the household.

Ben is intelligent, affectionate, and accustomed to communicating with the family through a specially designed device. But when he contracts rabies, his behaviour begins to change.

As Ben becomes increasingly aggressive and unpredictable, what should have been a relaxing getaway turns into a fight for survival. The chimpanzee’s strength, intelligence, and familiarity with the house make him a particularly dangerous threat.

With limited opportunities to escape or contact help, Lucy and her friends must find ways to protect themselves while Ben moves through the property. The family’s swimming pool offers temporary safety, but remaining there creates problems of its own.

Directed by Johannes Roberts, Primate combines animal attack horror with elements of a slasher film. Its central threat comes from an animal that was once trusted and loved, creating a disturbing contrast between Ben’s place in the family and the violence that follows his infection.

The film uses confined spaces, isolation, and the characters’ attempts to outmaneuver a powerful predator to build its survival horror premise.

Why Primate Is on Love of Gothic

Primate falls within the animal attack and survival horror genres, using a rabies-infected chimpanzee as the central threat. Its story explores the danger of a familiar animal becoming violent, turning a family home into a place where the characters must fight to survive.

The film draws on familiar creature horror and slasher conventions, including isolation, pursuit, violent attacks, and a group of people trapped with a dangerous predator. Ben’s intelligence and physical strength add another dimension to the threat.

Its combination of animal attack horror, violence, confinement, and survival places Primate within the broader horror cinema represented on Love of Gothic.

Watch

Trailer

Reviews

Sign in to write a review

Love Of Gothic Staff review

A Surprisingly Good Creature Feature

★★★☆☆
Read review

Primate was a pleasant surprise. Creature features can be pretty hit or miss, especially when they rely on an animal behaving in ways that stretch credibility. This one actually puts some thought into its premise and delivers a fairly entertaining survival horror film.

One of the things I appreciated most was that the characters generally make sensible decisions when faced with danger. There are still a few questionable choices, as you'd expect from a horror movie, but many of their actions feel like reasonable responses to the situation. The decision to retreat into the swimming pool, for example, was particularly clever. It gives them some protection from the chimpanzee while creating a new problem: they're relatively safe as long as they stay in the water, but they can't stay there forever.

The film also makes good use of the chimpanzee's rabies infection. Its aggression, confusion, and heightened reactions to sound help make its behaviour unsettling. There are even moments where it appears more lucid, which adds some unpredictability to the threat.

That said, the movie occasionally gives the chimpanzee a little more deliberate thought and intention than I'd expect from an animal suffering from rabies. One scene involving its communication device feels particularly far-fetched, as the chimp appears to use it to deliberately taunt one of the characters. It's a stretch, and there are a few other moments where its behaviour feels more calculated than instinctive. Fortunately, these moments are easy enough to overlook.

What works particularly well is how the movie maintains tension without constantly relying on characters doing something incredibly stupid. The danger feels immediate, the characters have limited options, and their attempts to survive create new challenges that keep the story moving.

Primate takes some liberties with animal behaviour, but it handles its central threat and survival scenarios well enough that those liberties rarely become a major distraction. It's a fairly well-thought-out creature feature with some clever moments, decent tension, and enough going for it to make it worth watching.

Was this review helpful?Report review