Primate is a 2026 natural horror film directed and co-written by Johannes Roberts, the filmmaker behind 47 Meters Down and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, released by Paramount. It stars Johnny Sequoyah as Lucy, alongside Jessica Alexander, Gia Hunter, and Oscar winner Troy Kotsur as her father. The premise: Lucy returns home to Hawaii for the summer, where her family keeps a pet chimpanzee named Ben, who is then bitten by a rabid mongoose and transformed from beloved companion into something considerably less friendly. A pool party in an isolated cliffside mansion becomes a fight for survival.

I should declare my bias up front. I have a genuine, long-held fear of monkeys, and a particular horror at the idea of people keeping them as pets, rooted in a real and widely reported news story from years ago involving a woman and a chimpanzee that ended about as badly as it possibly could. So I came to this film already primed. And in what I can only assume was a deliberate act of hostility, Primate opens by depicting almost precisely that scenario within its first thirty seconds, as a visiting veterinarian is attacked and has his face torn off. Thank you for that. Wonderful way to begin an evening.

Here is the frustrating part: the premise is good. A rabid chimpanzee is a legitimately terrifying idea. Chimps possess enormous strength, and this one has been stripped of everything that made it gentle. There was a genuinely effective horror film available here.

What sinks it is the people. Every character in Primate has the survival instincts of a wet rag. Nobody reacts to danger in a way that resembles competence, nobody forms a plan that survives more than a minute, and time and again someone makes a decision so spectacularly foolish that it directly results in another character's death. I lost count of the number of times I watched a character do something and said out loud, with total sincerity, that they deserved whatever the monkey was about to do to them. When a horror film has me actively rooting for the animal against the humans, something has gone badly wrong in the writing. The broader critical consensus flags the same weakness, with reviewers repeatedly pointing to shallow characterisation and flat dialogue holding it back.

I do want to give credit where it is genuinely earned, and there are two things here worth praising. First, Ben is not a CGI creation. He is performed by a movement and mime specialist in a practical suit, which in 2026 is a legitimately admirable choice, and the physicality of the performance is convincing, particularly the animal strength and the sudden bursts of rage. Second, Roberts pulls off a piece of real technical ambition in the climax, mounting a motor-driven six-sided mirror rig around the camera to create a disorienting spinning effect. Both choices show far more imagination than the screenplay ever does.