Director: Johannes Roberts
Starring: Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Victoria Wyant, Gia Hunter, Benjamin Cheng, Troy Kotsur
Certificate: 18
Run Time: 89 mins

Primate is a creature feature horror film about a chimpanzee who goes on a killer rampage after becoming infected with rabies. It’s directed by Johannes Roberts, whose credits include 47 Meters Down, The Strangers: Prey at Night and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City – quite the chequered CV. The film opens with a vet entering an outdoor animal enclosure, where his face is grossly turn off by said chimpanzee, before the film winds back 36 hours earlier. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) is taking a flight back home after spending years away at college with her best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant), but Lucy doesn’t know that Kate has invited her friend Hannah (Jessica Alexander) to join the club too. Lucy’s deaf father, Adam (Troy Kotsur) is a celebrated author who lives on the edge of a cliff in a beautiful home with younger daughter Erin (Gia Hunter). They have an adopted chimpanzee, Ben, who Adam has taught to be highly intelligent and he communicates using custom soundboard software on a tablet. But when Ben gets bitten my a rabid mongoose, all hell breaks loose…

While it’s lacking in the script and character development department, Primate is a lean and mean natural horror film that relishes in its visceral violence and brutal body-part dismemberment. While I wouldn’t say it’s frightening, the film’s undeniably intense and there were several sequences where I winced – this is probably the nastiest horror I’ve seen since Terrifier 3 or In A Violent Nature. There’s a couple of very effective sequences, especially an impressively tense encounter in a bed. A significant portion of the film is set in an infinity pool – a place where Ben can’t attack, given the hydrophobia caused by rabies – novel, considering it’s the inverse of other natural horror films involving underwater creatures.

Hats off to Roberts and the crew on opting for practical physical effects over CGI. The killer chimpanzee is played by former mixed martial artist Miguel Torres Umba, and the way in which he moves brings a real menace that you’d never get with digital. The film’s also confidently shot by Stephen Murphy, with the camera often swirling around and peering on the characters like they’re being watched. Adrian Johnston’s score is also terrific, with memorable themes and its 1980s synth-heavy sound reminiscent of the works of John Carpenter.

It’s just a shame that the film drops the ball in the script department. Roberts co-writes the script with Ernest Riera and some of the dialogue is really ropey, not helped by some of the unconvincing performances from the cast. That said, the two performances that fare well are Johnny Sequoyah as the likeable lead and Troy Kotsur as the father – the deaf representation is a nice touch and lends the film some much-needed emotion, but it also results in an excellent set piece devoid of sound that’s from Kotsur’s perspective. After his Best Supporting Actor win for CODA, it’s refreshing to see Kotsur back on the big screen.

Primate is ultimately an effective animal rampage horror, a genre that no filmmaker’s really explored for a while. It’s grisly and gnarly, with the reliance on practical effects lending the film a real weight. I just wish the script and character development were on the same level – then we’d really be talking. Despite this, Primate is undeniably Johannes Roberts’s best film (although that’s damning with faint praise) and I hope it inspires him to be similarly creative in his future works.