Primate (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Johannes RobertsRelease Date(s)
2025 (April 21, 2026)Studio(s)
18Hz Productions/Paramount Pictures (Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: A
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
High concept pitch, all you need to know: Cujo with a Chimp. If that doesn’t get you, then this isn’t for you. But if you arched an eyebrow, smiled a little bit or thought to yourself, “take my money”—you’re going to have fun with this dumb movie. I kinda love it. I generally hate the whole “guilty pleasure” label, but if there’s a gun to my head and I have to assign that label—this is the flick I’m doing that with. Directed by genre workhorse Johannes Roberts (the two 47 Meters Down, The Strangers: Prey At Night and the middle child Resident Evil film with Kaya Scodelario), Primate follows Lucy as she heads back to spend time with her deaf father and her sister Erin, who live in a mini-resort on a cliff in Hawaii. Also, back home is a chimpanzee named Ben, the subject of her dead mother’s linguistics research. Also along for the fun, so we can increase the potential body count, is Lucy’s best friend Kate, Kate’s best friend and mean girl Hannah who is hard flirting with a couple of dude brahs on the plane also heading to Hawaii. Psst, get their number girls, so you can call them for help! So, there you go—everything is there, isolation, limited communication and an adult chimp that communicates through sign language and a creepy voiced tablet. The movie jumps right in with a scene that occurs thirty-six hours prior to Lucy’s trip home giving us a nice helping of gore right at the top and it moves pretty fast from there.
The interesting thing about the movie is its amiability; all the girls are incredibly likeable. Even Hannah—who you’d expect to be kind of a bitch, but she isn’t. It has to be something with Jessica Alexander who just seems like a truly lovely person and based on the BTS on this disc, everyone seems to just fall in love with her. More on that in a second. So, when it’s clear a lot of folks are going to have their faces ripped off chimp-style, there is real dread that none of these people deserve it which just make it all the more heartbreaking in a way. The other interesting thing is how clear this movie was shot on a set and Ben is man-in-suit. It should be a strike, but it’s so—I dunno—well-structured that you appreciate the fact that it’s wholly tactile and not CGI across the board or filmed in a Volume soundstage. It’s quaint and almost nostalgic. Another huge plus for this film is the score by Adrian Johnston. It’s quite lovely actually—it’s like if 70s giallo scores and 80s Tangerine Dream soundtracks had a one-night stand and nine months later out comes the score to Primate. Sit back, turn off your brain and you will believe the incubation period for full blown rabies is twelve hours.
This is a pretty okay special edition. Special features are very much EPK based and strictly a day or two on set. Spread across four featurettes, Primal Terror (9:29) is a making of, New Blood (10:01) is about the actresses, Creating Ben (11:22) is about the make-up and Miguel Torrese Umba, the actor who performed as Ben and Designing Paradise (7:10) is focused on the set design with some fun trivia about the real house the set is based on—and there is a lot of time devoted to Jessica Alexander across the four of them. There’s also a commentary with Roberts and producer Walter Hamada having a very friendly discussion about how the film came to be, what it was before it was a chimp (spoiler: it was double Cujo) and other things future Primate film scholars can pour over. Sound (Dolby Atmos) and picture quality are very good—no complaints at all on either front. A Digital Code is also included and all extras are available on your favorite VOD provider.
- Todd Doogan