Filmmaker Johannes Roberts absolutely understood the assignment with PRIMATE, a film about a pet chimpanzee turned killer. In any film with that premise, the one thing we all expect is to see is the chimp tearing someone’s face off, the which Ben, the chimp in question, does in the first 5 minutes. Once that trope is out of the way, Roberts can get on with his crackerjack horror film, one rife with suspense, surprises, and more than a few valuable lessons, like never turn around when running from a crazed animal. And if there is a flaw in PRIMATE, an otherwise thoroughly and terrifyingly entertaining flick, it’s including that trope.
We roll back the clock to 36 hours earlier as college student Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) is flying home to Hawaii with best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant), and Kate’s irritating friend, Hannah (Jess Alexander), invited along to spend the summer on the islands with Kate’s family. It’s been tough for Lucy in the last year, losing her linguist mother to cancer and avoiding father, Adam (Troy Kotsur) and younger sister, Erin (Gia Hunter). And Ben, the live-in science experiment started by Lucy’s mother to prove that chimpanzees are capable of communicating with humans in more than a merely perfunctory fashion. At this point, Ben is an adorable creature, much given to teddy bears and telling Lucy, via a language board, that he missed her. That will change, of course, but not before we get to know the playful sweetness of the family dynamics that underlie such things as Lucy’s absence and father Adam’s extended trips promoting his successful series of novels.
With the house to themselves, these young adults decide to party (chastely) and invite the bros (Tienne Simon, Charlie Mann) that they met on the plane to (less chastely) join them at the spectacular house on the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean. The isolation, and the view that will become even more killer, sets the scene for the mayhem to come without trying too hard. And that’s the virtue of Roberts’ writing. He sets the scene with some prescient camera angles, fleshes out the characters without wallowing in exposition, and gets the action underway as soon as the elements are in place. And once that happens, all hell breaks loose as we discover just how strong and ruthless a chimpanzee can be, and what happens when one goes on a rampage armed with rage and an impressive vocabulary.
Sure, there are some graphic scenes of humans dying in very unpleasant ways, but Roberts is judicious in his storytelling. He shows us what Ben is planning on doing, but rather than stay there, he focuses on the eyes, or rather eye, of one victim as the full horror registers. For another victim, there is the classic move of having someone arrive at the house after the rampage has started with Lucy and friends hiding silently in the pool a few floors below. Yes, it’s been done many times, having someone blithely wandering around a seemingly empty house unaware of what is lurking there ready to make mincemeat of him. But the feints and bluffs are done with admirable aplomb that mixes camera moves, oblivious dialogue, and a house teeming with nooks and crannies where Ben can lurk with extreme prejudice, The piece de resistance, though, is confining Lucy and friends to that swimming pool, almost but not quite out of reach of Ben, who is not just literate, but fully capable of almost Machiavellian planning.
The cast delivers as kids tasked with finding a way to survive while scared out of their minds. They don’t suddenly become animal experts, aside from knowing that chimps can’t swim, and the palpable fear they experience while trying to get past Ben is visceral rather than melodramatic. They rise to the more subtle moments, too, involving resentments and affronts. The way Lucy goads Hannah into calling the plane bros when the interloper starts flirting with Hannah’s brother, and her crush, Nick (Benjamin Cheng), and the way the camera lingers just long enough on Sequoyah’s face as Lucy realizes that Nick is into Hannah.
Also of note is the excellent use of Kotsur’s profound deafness. An Oscar®-winner for CODA, here he brings the same fluid eloquence to his sign language that emphasizes its precision and its ability to convey feelings without the barrier of words that somehow has a greater scope of expression, from the offhand sign for boring, to the way Adam asks Nick how his girlfriend is by using a universal sign for a good-looking woman. There is something direct and effusive about sign language, and Kotsur’s vibrant face while doing it.
PRIMATE is a taut film that delivers a heart-stopping wallop while we wait to see who will survive the long night of a very disturbed chimp. Don’t forget to breathe.
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