Primate Is a Creature Feature That Earns Its Gore and Not Much Else
If you have been following horror in 2026, you have probably heard that Johannes Roberts, the director behind The Strangers: Prey at Night, has a new film out. Primate is not a film I sought out with any particular urgency. I was simply looking for something to catch at the theater, leaning further into my horror era, and figured this was as good a reason as any. I had seen maybe two trailers. That was enough.
What I can tell you upfront is this: Primate is a fun moviegoing experience, but it is not a film that will ask much of you intellectually. If you go in expecting something in the vein of Get Out or Nope, you will leave disappointed. If you go in understanding that this is a creature feature paying loving homage to the horror films that came before it, you will likely walk out satisfied. The audience at my matinee showing seemed to reach that same conclusion. There were maybe fifteen of us in the theater on a Friday afternoon, and by the end, everyone appeared to have had a good time. People laughed. People screamed. That communal experience is not something you can manufacture, and it counts for a great deal.
The film follows Lucy, a young woman returning home to her family's stunning cliffside estate in Hawaii after time away, bringing two friends along for what is supposed to be an easy summer. What they do not know is that the family has a pet chimpanzee named Ben. When Ben contracts a virus from a mongoose, their coastal retreat becomes something far more dangerous.
The moment I saw the first trailer, my mind went straight to the Gordy's Home sequence in Jordan Peele's Nope, which happens to be my favorite Jordan Peele film. I saw Nope four times in the theater. What I love most about it is the way it layers history and education into the horror without ever making you feel like you are sitting in a classroom. Primate feels very much like a film that watched the Gordy's Home segment and asked what a feature-length version of that attack might look like. It also draws from the real 2009 mauling of Charla Nash, a deeply tragic case in which a woman was attacked by her friend's pet chimpanzee and suffered devastating, life-altering injuries. That real-world anchor gives the film a layer of weight its screenplay does not always earn on its own.
None of the references feel accidental. The film is in active conversation with its predecessors, and for viewers who love horror history, there is genuine pleasure in clocking them as they surface.
Where Primate struggles is in everything that happens before the chimp goes on the rampage, which takes roughly 40 minutes to arrive. The cast includes Troy Kotsur, an Academy Award winner, playing Lucy's hearing-impaired father, and the family communicates with Ben through sign language and voice-adaptive technology. It is a genuinely interesting setup that the film never develops with any real depth. The signing between the leads feels unrehearsed, with long pauses that draw attention to the artificiality rather than pulling you into the scene. If you have ever watched Switched at Birth and seen how fully that cast integrated ASL into their performances, you understand what it looks like when an actor has truly internalized a skill versus when they are still finding their footing. I wished the production had given that element more rehearsal time, because the awkwardness in those scenes competes with the tension the film is trying to build.
Lucy's backstory is similarly thin. Her mother has passed, she was away, there is something unresolved at home. Why she left and what that tension actually means are questions the film raises and then quietly abandons. This is where a comparison to Cujo becomes useful. That film invests considerable time in its human characters before the dog ever becomes a real threat. Primate would have benefited from some of that patience, something that made you believe in these friendships before putting them under pressure.
Once Ben is unleashed, however, the film earns back what it spent. The horror in the second half is tense, physical, and genuinely gory in ways that feel grounded rather than gratuitous. Roberts is smart to lean into the real-world brutality of chimpanzee attacks. These are extraordinarily strong animals, and layering rabies-fueled irrationality on top of that produces something viscerally frightening in a way that pure fiction sometimes cannot. Jeanie Sequoia, a relatively new British actress, carries the film as Lucy with enough presence to keep you anchored even when the script is not giving her much to work with. That is no small thing.
Primate released in January, which tells you something about how the studio positioned it. It is not awards bait and it does not pretend to be. Honestly, I think it would have made a wonderful Valentine's Day release. There is something fitting about watching a group of young people try to outsmart a rabid chimpanzee on a cliffside Hawaiian estate as a February date night movie. But here in January, as a popcorn film that delivers on creature-feature thrills while asking very little in return, it holds its own.
Two and a half out of five stars. A solid C. It does what it sets out to do, and on a slow January weekend, that is more than enough.
Have you seen Primate? What Easter eggs and horror references did you catch? Drop them in the comments below.
Shaquanna "Quanna" Stevens is a film critic, educator, and storyteller who reviews films through the lens of culture, representation, and genre. She runs Her Reel Review, where she explores horror, romance, fantasy, and films by Black creators. When she's not writing or filming reviews, she teaches English IV Honors and AP Literature, advises student filmmakers, and helps young creatives develop their voices.
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