Jonah Naplan   January 9, 2026

Moviegoers have been taught to accept the month of January as a cinematic dumping ground for the type of palette-cleansing projects that arrive shortly after the build-up of awards bait and Christmastime crowd-pleasers. This year’s offerings include “Primate,” a pleasant surprise in almost every category. It probably didn’t need to put that much effort into its tight script or special effects in order to get by, but it stands out because it did anyway. It’s a throwback slasher about a chimpanzee with rabies who starts killing everybody. That’s all you need to know. And “Primate” isn’t nearly bold enough to try to be anything more.

Directed by Johannes Roberts (“47 Meters Down,” “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City”) and written by him and Ernest Riera, “Primate” begins with a freezing cold open that tosses us right into the carnage. Ben, a pet chimp who contracts rabies after getting bitten by a mongoose, attacks and kills his caretaker in a startling moment of gore that clearly indicates to the audience what kind of creature feature they’ve bought a ticket to. The film then jumps backwards 36 hours earlier to introduce the central human characters, which consist of college students Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), Hannah (Jessica Alexander), Kate (Victoria Wyant), and Nick (Benjamin Cheng), all established through vague dialogue exchanges. They’re traveling to Hawaii where Lucy’s deaf father Adam (Troy Kotsur) owns a luxurious cliffside home. At the house, too, is Lucy’s younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter), who’s frustrated with her big sis because of how long she’s been away from home, so she’s come to rely on the cuddly Ben for companionship.

When Adam leaves to go on tour for a new book he’s written, the youngins have got the whole place to themselves, so, naturally, they party it up. It isn’t long, though, before Ben’s behavior grows increasingly unusual and erratic and a night of fun quickly turns into a night of terror as this primate shows his thirst for blood. Trust that the filmmakers will take every chance they get to flex their gnarly muscles and design several creative kills throughout that will make you wince and cringe as much as they’ll make you cheer. This January movie knows exactly what it’s supposed to be.

Running at a breezy 89 minutes, “Primate” is impressively airtight throughout. Largely taking place in one location, the film reckons that rabid animals have extreme hostility towards water, so the characters all pile into the pool where Ben can’t reach them. Of course, they’ll find excuses to get out eventually, whether for phones, pool floats, or the like, and the nimble Ben seems to be a master at finding all of the home’s secret nooks and crannies from which he can jump out and attack. You’ll be rooting for this vicious monkey to kill because who even are all these guys anyway?

This sort of trapped thriller formula invites multiple influences from classic horror movies including, most notably, “The Shining” and the original 1978 “Halloween” (there’s a standout sequence in a closet where Ben is Michael Myers peeking through the blinds). A later scene uses the same clever gimmicks as the “Quiet Place” franchise, whereby Adam returns home but can’t hear the approaching Ben or anything else going on around him, so the audio completely cuts out. They all just help to add a little extra spice to a plot that’s nothing we haven’t already seen one million times before. “Primate” may be slightly elevated above the others, though, just because of its dedicated technical prowess, combining the expert movement work of Miguel Torres Umba with visceral special effects and puppetry that convincingly brings this simian to terrifying life.

The movie is so entertaining for so long that its slight attempts to weigh in on undertones about grief and sisterhood as a feature of the female-centric story go largely overlooked. Both lead actresses (as the movie starts killing off unlucky victims, it’ll become clear which two this refers to) are much better than they ever needed to be for this type of project, refusing to make a lot of the same dumb choices that you’d see more poorly-written protagonists make in a similar slasher. So “Primate” exists in a sort of awkward middle ground, where it’s not abundantly over-the-top and stupid but lies somewhere between that and the hyper-serious idiosyncrasies of something like “The Strangers.” Wedded to an impossibly retro synth score, it struggles to hit the right balance within the gray area. But all the monkey carnage consistently hits.

At best, “Primate” is a hugely enjoyable time at the movies, and at worst, you might forget about it the second you leave the theater. But it’s undeniably gnarly and fun, and unafraid to be those things. It moves with all the amusing self-deprecation but tongue-and-cheek instability of the drunken college-age hooligans who arrive at the house late into the movie, having been called over for an orgy but will end up just being more snacks for Ben. When the chimp aggressively pins one of them down onto a bed, about to rip their jaw off, the guy playfully flirts “Woah, woah, at least ask me out to dinner first.”

Now playing in theaters.