PRIMATE = UNHINGED

Promotional movie poster for Primate (2026).

Written by Niomi Dylan Sass

When the previews for the movie you’re seeing in theaters are equally interesting and horrifying, then you know your ticket is going to be money well spent. One trailer consisted solely of a clip from the movie it was promoting, and it ended on an unsuspecting jump scare. Another preview was the Billie Eilish film, with a huge name directing it, Michael Bay. Speaking of directors making a huge name for themselves in their niche, Johannes Roberts added another heart-racing, stress-inducing horror film to his impressively growing resume. He has directed major films that I am a personal fan of, like The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018), Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021), and my personal most-liked movies that scare the living hell out of me– 47 Meters Down (2017) and 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019). I literally cannot with shark movies; I WILL be hiding under a blanket. However, I am not talking about those movies. I'm digging into how Johannes Roberts teamed up with Ernest Riera again to write another unnerving motion picture, Primate (2026). 

The family in this movie adopts a chimpanzee as a result of losing their linguistic professor mother to cancer. The deaf father (Troy Kotsur), an upcoming successful author, is expecting his daughter Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) to return home to him, her younger sister (Gia Hunter), and Ben, the family chimpanzee. Lucy travels back home with her friend Kate (Victoria Wyant), and Kate invites Hannah (Jess Alexander) to come stay with her for the summer. This means that Hannah will be tagging along with Kate and Lucy on their weekend getaway before Kate goes back home. Once their flight lands in a tropical paradise, they are all met at the airport by Kate’s brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng). They all head back to Lucy’s house –excuse me– tropical mansion, to keep her company while her Dad leaves for work, which seems to be a recurring pattern of his. 

Once Lucy gets home, her dad welcomes her with open arms, but her little sister is pressed like a panini because she had been gone for so long. After expressing her feelings to her sister, it turns into a heartwarming reunion with Ben the chimpanzee waiting underneath the bed for Lucy to recognize him. Ben has a tablet that acts as a communicator/translator at the push of a button. This chimpanzee has been raised to be exceptionally intelligent and has no problem communicating his feelings. It was really cute when Lucy finally recognized Ben because he kept pressing the buttons that would make his tablet say “miss” and “Lucy” over and over again. This is how my Chihuahua would react if it had a voice box every time I came back from a different room in my apartment.

While there is a happy reunion going on upstairs, Hannah is getting to know Nick a little better, if you know what I mean. However, Lucy may have feelings for Nick, which she has never been brave enough to share, even though her best friend, sister, and father all know she likes him. A new baddie has entered the villa, and the underlying drama with this storyline is giving Love Island. After Nick is done flirting with Hannah by giving her a joint, she heads outside to smoke it. This is when she is finally seeing the jaw-dropping backyard view, Lucy’s family has moonnneeyyyy. Hannah immediately sees the gorgeous pool below from the upper patio and heads down there to soak up the ambience. Ben comes out from the shadows and scares her. She is trying to be friendly but is still not used to a giant chimpanzee roaming around the premises like a guard dog. This is when Ben starts acting out. He grabs Hannah’s hand, as his grip is getting tighter and her nerves are peaking higher, Adam (Lucy’s Dad) blows his training whistle and gets Ben to stop. Adam apologizes for his behavior by typing it on his phone and adding that Ben tends to act out when strangers are around. 

Jess Alexander as Hannah and Ben the chimpanzee from Primate (2026).

Adam takes the chimpanzee back to his enclosure and notices that Ben has been bitten by a mongoose. Adam signs to Ben to ask if he has been fighting with the neighbor's pet again, which the chimp fully understood Adam’s accusation because he denied it. The evidence was apparent since there was a dead mongoose in his enclosure from the brawl they had. Adam, being the intellect that he is, knows that when animals get hydrophobic –scared of water– it could be a sign of rabies, and Ben was acting awfully strange next to the pool. To be safe, Adam contacts a veterinarian to come dress the wound and give Ben antibiotics the next day. He locks Ben up in his enclosure, which was way nicer than an Airbnb I rented for two months. The next day, as Adam is getting ready to leave to seek an opportunity for his book to be turned into a film, he gives Lucy strict instructions. He tells her the vet is on the way to come help with Ben’s bite, but until then, she has to leave Ben locked up, just in case the mongoose was rabid. 

We see in the very first scene of the movie the vet finally coming to help Ben. The vet has a syringe of medicine out and is trying to get Ben to calm down so he can administer the shot. This was the first kill of the movie and told us, the audience, just how graphic the death scenes were going to be. We see Ben pull the vet into a hidden part of his enclosure, start to beat on him, then rip the skin of his face completely clean off his skull while he was still alive. After this scene, the movie begins 36 hours earlier, when the girls were boarding their flight. 

Going back a bit, before Ben turned rabid and after the dad left, the grown girls and Nick were having a grand old time hanging out in the luxuriousness of Lucy’s villa. They were indulging themselves with some alcoholic beverages, and Miss Kate couldn’t keep it all down. She starts to get sick, and her best friend Lucy helps her get to bed. As Lucy is helping, this is when the underlying story begins to unfold. Hannah tells Nick that she thinks Lucy likes him, but Nick says he thinks of her as a little sister. This leads to them making out, and guess who comes back from helping out Kate? The drammaaa, I was definitely a fan of it.

A little later in the night, around the same time the vet came to help out Ben, Kate gets up to use the bathroom. She sees that Ben is out and acting like a little weirdo, so she instantaneously calls for Lucy to come downstairs. After they get away from him, Ben goes down to the pool where Nick and Hannah are. The girls follow the chimp down to the lower level of the patio to try to get him back into his enclosure. Ben starts to get aggressive, they see blood on him, and putting the two together, they have concluded that perchance something may have happened to the vet. Together, they try to calm Ben down and tie him up so they can take him back. Then Erin comes downstairs to assist them, thinking she may be of better use since she spent the most time with Ben. However, this is the point where the rabies has fully engulfed what was left of Ben’s brain. He attacked Erin and gnawed on the back of her leg. As soon as they got her free from the strong grip of the chimpanzee’s jaw, they realized he wouldn’t and couldn’t swim; they all jumped in the pool for safety. 

Now, Erin is bleeding out in the pool with Lucy, Kate, Hannah, and Nick all seeking safety from Ben in the small body of water overlooking a cliff. As the chimp is circling the pool, this group is quickly realizing that they are trapped, and the chimp registered this, too. Ben stands there looking at them all and starts to maniacally laugh at their fear. The group is left floating in the pool to concoct a plan. On the deck of the pool is one of their cell phones and some items that may aid in their defense or survival. Their summer retreat is quickly coming to an end, with them having to retreat from the clutches of a rabid chimpanzee. Not all of them make it, so who is going to survive the night? Will Ben regain his memories of his love for his family before it’s too late? Is rabies curable? Will the dad have a change of plans and come home? Will another baddie enter the villa?

Johnny Sequoyah as Lucy in Primate (2026).

It’s clear that the director, Johannes Roberts, is phenomenal at making the audience scared without the overuse of loud jump scares. For instance, Insidious (2010) is a movie that relies on the mixture of overbearing sound effects, in addition to an unexpected jump scare, continuously causing your brain to get overstimulated quickly. I’d argue Insidious (2010) is not as scary as the movie is loud. In the movie Primate (2026), there was suspense that continued to build. There was a layer of sympathy added based on who the antagonist was, the chimpanzee. Ben was basically a furry son and a brother who got sick, becoming feral and dangerous. You see the internal struggle of Lucy and Erin trying their best not to harm Ben majority of the time, just in case they could help him. I caught myself feeling bad for Ben at times. There were small moments where you could see who he once was is still there, for at least a few seconds. 

The acting in the movie was adequate, considering a lot of the people cast in the film don’t have other films in their repertoire, and that's just a fancy word for IMDB. Jess Alexander, who played Hannah, was the only person I recognized in the film. She got to play Vanessa, the human version of Ursula the Sea Witch, in the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid (2023). My prediction is that this is going to be the movie that helps spearhead her career in the horror industry. I think she had the standout role in this movie. I loved that I hated her, and I hated that I loved her, which is the true sign of someone playing an agitator role well. What I appreciated the most, like more than I could ever express, there were no corny lines during kills, you know what I mean? They are called Pre-Mortem One-Liner’s. A good example of a bad one would be from the film Freddy Vs. Jason (2003), when the protagonist exclaims, “Welcome to MY world, Bitch!” right before she decapitates the head of Freddy Krueger. I’m thrilled to say that this movie did not contain anything of the sort, which, let’s face it, more horror movies indulge in it than not. 

One of my favorite parts was a moment when Lucy was face-to-face with the chimp, and he stared at her like he was sorry. Ben put up his hand gently towards Lucy’s. They held each other's hands for a moment while gazing into one another's eyes. In that instant, it felt like Ben was back. However, the next moment, while still making the same eye contact with her, he bent Lucy’s hand back, breaking every finger on the hand he was holding. Another treasured scene I encountered was while Lucy and Kate were hiding from Ben. They found themselves in a closet, holding their breaths, trying to not make a single bit of sound. Right outside the door in the living room was an angry ape searching for his next victim. The girls accidentally knocked something over, of course, giving away their hidden location. They get scared further into the closet, hiding behind hung garments, as the mega monkey starts to bust down the closet door. The entire scene felt like an homage to John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), where Michael Myers is going after his sister Laurie Strode while she hides in the closet from him. Both Ben and Michael erratically forced their way into the locked entrance to try to attack their family member in a rage that possessed them.  

I think this is the perfect horror movie about what could happen to domesticated animals if they were to turn evil. It gives Cujo (1983) vibes. If y'all don’t know what that movie is, it was based on the Stephen King novel where a dog contracts rabies and goes on a killing spree. This version ups the stakes a little more with the animal being an intelligent chimpanzee. Since the monkey has opposable thumbs for one, and a way to communicate for two, that leaves room for more creative and scarier thrills, chills, and kills. The reason movies with killer animals have you sympathizing with them is the fact that unconditional love is what we seek from furry companions. A person with an animal in that précis will be holding onto the chance of that love still being there. When the creatures that are the most innocent things on the planet become the exact opposite, it makes the humans in these scenarios struggle with letting go. Lastly, being a fan of gore, I was pleased with how graphic the death scenes were. If I could describe them using one word, it would be: UNHINGED. This is a must-watch movie if you are a horror fan. If you could see my hands on my keyboard right now, they are down. Hands down. 

Ben, an alternate version of the promotional movie poster for Primate (2026).