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Primate

MOVIE

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Opening Date

22 Jan 2026

Rating

M18 Violence and Gore

Runtime

89 mins

Language

English with English & Chinese subtitles

Genre

Horror

Director

Johannes Roberts

Cast

Kevin McNally, Johnny Sequoyah, Troy Kotsur

Synopsis

Home from college, Lucy reunites with family including pet chimp Ben. Ben contracts rabies during a pool party and turns aggressive. Lucy and friends barricade in pool, devising ways to survive the vicious chimp.

Reviews

By InCinemas 22 Jan 2026

Pure animalistic horror.

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If you’re a fan of cringe horror of the late early 2000s and missing a taste of distinct nostalgia, Primate will scratch that itch for you. This creature feature has the very style and colour that immediately brings you back to a specific time when genre films like these were all the rage.

Directed and co-written by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City), Primate is a holiday gone wrong when a family's adopted chimpanzee named Ben goes on a violent rampage after contracting rabies. The film stars Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Gia Hunter, Victoria Wyant, Benjamin Cheng, and Troy Kotsur.

Primate follows college student Lucy (Sequoyah) as she returns to her lush Hawaii home where her novelist father Adam (Kotsur) and younger sister Erin (Hunter) reside with their pet chimpanzee Ben. Accompanying Lucy are her best friend Kate (Wyant), Hannah (Alexander), and Kate’s brother Nick (Cheng).

Lucy’s father almost immediately leaves to travel for work, leaving the kids to their own devices in a beautiful home that makes the perfect setting for a typical house party.

Everything up to this point is cringey dialogue and stereotypical characters you’d expect from a low-budget horror film. But none of these matter because the film’s main draw overexceeds from a regular creature feature standpoint, all for its decision to prioritise practical effects over CGI. Putting a man in that chimp suit gave the character more mobility and authenticity in a way CGI could never.

Lucy and her friends’ enjoyment of her “holiday home” gets cut short when an injured and violent Ben is out of his cage. What follows is gore galore that’ll leave you squeamish and squirming in your seats as the rabid Ben goes on his wild rampage of tearing into anyone and everyone he can get his hands on.

One of the more subtly terrifying scenes sees Ben pursuing Lucy, whose cries for help go unnoticed by her hearing-disabled father, who decidedly came home to check on her. It’s a beautifully shot atmostpheric moment witnessing her helplessness as the audio cuts to put us in Adam’s shoes.

Primate is animalistic horror that will satiate thrill seekers for its jump scares and gory attacks alone. This is right up the alley for anyone who enjoys films like the Final Destination franchise.
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