Move over, elevated horror. Following hot on the heels of Anaconda and Dangerous Animals, Johannes Roberts adds to the voguish canon of creature features with this cheerfully disreputable slasher about a rabid chimpanzee running amok among affluent and nubile American youth.
It makes no grand claims for itself, gesturing briefly at ethical complexity before pegging it towards efficient, blood-soaked mayhem.
The set-up is aggressively familiar: a clutch of variously attracted and repelled college students retreat to an absurdly opulent Hawaiian clifftop house to decompress, bicker and flirt.
Leaning into the same tragic concerns of Karen Joy Fowler’s novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and James Marsh’s documentary Project Nim, Primate concerns the Wild West behavioural studies of sign-language acquisition among animals that blighted 1970s psychology.
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Ben, a pet chimpanzee and adopted brother of the heroine, Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), soon becomes a victim of captivity, unethical scientific meddling and an unlucky encounter with a rabies-infected mongoose. Murderous frenzy ensues.
Roberts, the director of the neat shark-survival flick 47 Metres Down, keeps things moving at a clip. The film’s pleasures are strictly functional: jump scares, frantic chases, faces torn asunder with escalating ingenuity. The motion performer Miguel Torres Umba, in a monkey suit, does enough to suspend disbelief between the violent B-movie thrills.
It’s a fine choice for a film questioning the confinement of wild animals for human use, but the relentless gore never allows for the unfortunate beast to be more than a furry slasher villain.
There are moments of wit, particularly the well-flagged stupidity of two late-arriving frat boys, and one carefully staged sequence involving a deaf father (a welcome Hollywood role for Troy Kotsur, who won an Ocar for his role in Coda) unknowingly stalked through his own home. These coalesce into amusing, tense and joyfully disposable entertainment carefully calibrated for audience shrieks and merriment.
In cinemas from Friday, January 30th
