What a bananas surprise! January at the box office is known to be the dumping ground of movie season. The holidays are over and eligibility for awards is cut off. If there’s anything that’s going to stand out, it’s a horror film with an insane premise. Enter: Primate, which on its face, feels exactly like the kind of scary January release that slides in under the radar and makes no impact. Fortunately for audiences, they’re in for a surprisingly great time. Primate not only delivers on its evil monkey premise to the fullest, it’s quietly the best slasher movie in decades.

The film gives barely any time for you to even speculate on why Ben, the beloved pet chimpanzee, goes berzerk. It opens with a title card that essentially highlights the word “rabies” and then moves on. It’s a clever way of getting rid of what might have been tedious expository scenes or a third act reveal that doesn’t hit the way you’d like. Instead, we’re treated to a very nasty kill and a “36 hours before” transition that gets us up to speed on the humans. College student Lucy, played by Johnny Sequoyah, is visiting her family in Hawaii with some friends for the summer. Her father, played by Academy Award winner Troy Kotsur, is a best selling author who is drowning himself in his work since the passing of her mother the previous year. Lucy’s sister Erin, played by Gia Hunter, feels abandoned by her since she left for college, but is warming up to having a fun summer with Lucy and her friends. It feels like there’s an element missing… oh yeah, the chimp. Lucy and Erin’s mother worked with teaching animals how to communicate with humans and they have had Ben as a pet since Lucy was little. Once you get over how clunky that explanation feels, you’ll start having fun. Promise.

Lucky for us, it doesn’t take very long for Ben to turn evil. The scenes where he’s friendly are maybe just as unsettling as when he’s bashing in heads. That’s thanks to the dual talents of Miguel Hernando Torres Umba (physical performance) and Ben Pronsky (vocal performance). There’s moments where we see Ben in clear light where it’s undeniably a man in a very convincing monkey suit and his interactions with the young women feel odd to say the least. But once Ben is able to go feral, that unsettling quality works to the film’s advantage. We see so much of the chimp reflected in pool water, through fluted glass doors, and obscured through bed netting. Each filter gives the costume a level of terror and uneasiness that immediately dispels the silly premise of the film. The moment Ben starts to kill, he’s taken very seriously. This has to be what walking out of Child’s Play in 1988 felt like. The victims’ reactions vary from playful and naive to heartbroken. There’s scenes in between killings where it seems like Ben’s old personality is trying to fight through the disease. Those play just as heartbreaking as him taunting people who he’s loved his whole life.

Location wise, the film is sparse. It mostly takes place in the Lucy’s family home in Hawaii and spends a good amount of its short runtime inside of a pool. “Ben can’t swim!”, a friend exclaims and dooms these poor characters to tread water until they figure a way out. Spanning the course of a whole night, the film does feel a little dark. There’s moments when you almost need to squint to be able to tell what’s going on. It adds to the effect of the monkey suit, hiding any imperfections in the shadows, but it can be a little distracting when you can’t even tell who the person being chased is. 

A full round of applause is deserved to Miguel Hernando Torres Umba for his physical performance of Ben. In a world where performances like this are mostly thrown to motion capture technology and turned into a Planet of the Apes hyper-realistic CGI creature, it’s so refreshing to see an actual convincing animal performance from a guy in a suit. Troy Kostur also stands out as the dad. It’s lovely to watch a film featuring a deaf actor where their disability isn’t the point of the film. Sign language and silence play into some of the set pieces, but never for exploitation. 

4 out of 5 stars.

Primate is a legitimate slasher. It hits all the beats you’d want from this wild premise while taking everything dead serious. It’s not often you get a horror film of this high quality this early in the year. Hopefully that bodes well for our collective cinematic journey into 2026.