It’s fortunate that British writer-director Johannes Roberts didn’t make a film based on an impulse he had 15 years ago.
“I was watching a dog going round and round a swimming pool, and I thought that would make a great idea for a movie,” he said in an interview after a screening of Primate at the Toronto After Dark film festival in October.
Instead, Roberts’ love for the classic horror of Stephen King and John Carpenter inspired him to create a film about an adopted pet chimpanzee with rabies that hits the cinemas on Friday.
In Primate, actor and movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba dons a cutting edge chimp suit to play Ben set to make horror history.
Ben is dressed in a red shirt, a color symbolizing death, blood and passion. Roberts digs red as some of his previous work has proven. 47 Meters Down (2017), for example, opens with an underwater shot of a red drink spilling into a swimming pool, and there’s plenty of red in later underwater shots as well, when teens defy their fate against a shark while trapped in a cage nearly 50 meters below surface.
Roberts digs directing teens. Most of his work features adolescents with fluctuating IQs. Primate is no exception.
In Primate teens on a tropical holiday encounter a pet chimp in the joint. Ben seems friendly first, until a mongoose bites him and he, probably like Stephen King’s Cujo the dog, blames the kids for the pain.
Ben unleashes hell and fury upon the sisters, the friends and the bimbos—he bites and breaks jaws.
But Primate isn’t just gore: Johnny Sequoyah (Lucy), Gia Hunter (Erin) and Troy Kotsur (Adam) deliver nuanced performances using eye contact and sign language; the sisters’ father is deaf adding depth to character interactions.
Primate stands out as a strong addition to horror that could become its own classic someday—a testament to Roberts’ old school approach where immersive storytelling and real actors and practical effects take center stage.
