What is it that separates humans from animals? Is it sentience or our ability to form complex language systems, or the fact that we’ve essentially conquered the world and become an apex predator that is feared by all other creatures walking our planet? The reality is that there is very little that divides us from the rest of the natural world, and any belief that we’re similar in any meaningful way is proven to be almost entirely false when we recognise that the attempt to put up boundaries between the two is simply a case of human arrogance – and sometimes, when a species spends so much time fighting to suppress nature, we can’t be surprised when it strikes back with an apoplectic ferocity that could terrify even the most immovable of people. This is the premise behind Primate, a film written by Ernest Riera and brought to life by Johannes Roberts, who has developed quite a fascination with horrifying stories of the macabre and maniacal when it comes to the natural world. The film is set in Hawai’i, and follows a group of teenagers who decide to spend their spring break in luxury at the home of Lucy Pinborough, whose father is a world-renowned novelist who is soon set to travel to promote his new book. He leaves behind Ben, his highly intelligent and caring chimpanzee, who had been trained to communicate by his late wife. Usually very gentle and placid, Ben comes into contact with a mongoose infected with rabies, which kickstarts a rampage through the house, where he targets the half-dozen teenagers who were expecting a weekend of reckless fun, rather than having to fight for their lives against a vicious mammal who has suddenly developed a deep bloodlust. An interesting concept in theory, but one that falls apart from its first moments, Primate is a genuinely strange film, and not in the way that piques our curiosity or challenges our understanding of the subject matter, but rather causes us to be entirely bewildered and frankly quite confused in more ways than was perhaps necessary.

Our relationship with nature has always been contentious – it’s difficult to understand exactly where the fascination with the natural world ends, and the unhinged terror felt when we realise its destructive power. This is the premise behind Primate, which attempts to contribute to the natural horror genre, a category that may be slightly waning in popularity, but still has quite a strong audience guiding it forward. Like in most cases, we find the root of the terror comes in humanity overstepping our boundaries and going beyond the delicate balance that has always existed between our world and the natural world (the fact that we have to compartmentalise the two makes it even clearer how far removed we are from our origins), which very rarely has positive outcomes. Primate is a film that positions nature as being more different rather than evil – it is not destructive so much as it is defensive, and every bit of harm humans experience from the natural world emerges as a result of our own actions. The character of Ben is fascinating because he’s not a villain in the traditional sense, but rather a victim of circumstance. The film makes a very simple but bold assertion: nature does not act out of malice but rather instinct, defending itself against anything that can cause it genuine harm. This is where so much of the horror in this film emerges, through the lack of intent and the abundance of unpredictability that can truly cause unexpected consequences. Ben becomes an amalgamation of the two worlds, partially human (in terms of his ability to communicate), but mostly wild animal, pushed over the edge as a result of the actions of others. His learned abilities position him as being seemingly a step above his peers in the wild, but this eventually becomes irrelevant as he regresses into a state where his instincts drive him, reminding those around him that he is, and will always be, a wild animal that cannot truly be tamed. More prominently, the film posits that intelligence as we know it is not a defining quality in terms of superiority, and in many cases can actually be the opposite.

There is clearly so much to be said about this subject, and in the hands of a more precise director, Primate could’ve been a major achievement. Therefore, where did it truly go off the rails, beyond the point of no return? For a film about human excess and the consequences of believing ourselves to have dominion over the natural world, this is a remarkably flaccid, lifeless work. Roberts is not the right person to tell this story, since he is motivated more by the horror than by the underlying commentary. There is absolutely nothing contained in the entirety of Primate that Jordan Peele didn’t achieve in those first fifteen minutes of Nope years ago, which tackled a similar concept but in a way that was both interesting and utterly terrifying. Here we have an unstructured, lacklustre work that tries to be beyond violent, not realising that gore and gruesome destruction are only meaningful if it has something to say. A slasher movie about a feral, rabies-infected chimpanzee targeting a group of hedonistic teenagers is not nearly compelling enough, and it leads us to wonder whether there was actually any thought that went into the film’s construction beyond the obvious attempt to shock, which is never a good reason to make a horror film. The filmmaking itself is also quite poor – on a technical level, Primate just looks awful. The lighting is terrible (likely a result of the film’s intention to hide Ben as much as possible, since he was entirely made through computer-generated imagery, an understandable choice considering the days of casting a real animal in such a role are long behind us), the production design makes very little sense and the overall experience is genuinely quite weak, despite giving off the illusion of being interesting. It’s not a good film in the slightest, and we have to wonder who honestly thought this would be a convincing approach to the subject matter, which should not have been nearly this tacky.

There is one redeeming quality in Primate, which is the performance delivered by Troy Kotsur, an actor who emerged out of relative obscurity (despite being a vital figure amongst the deaf community, working on both stage and film to represent people living with the disability) with the film CODA, in which he immediately proved to be an essential artist. Unfortunately, despite being genuinely very good in this film, he is massively underused – he appears primarily at the start and end of the film, with a couple of brief moments in between that remind us of his character’s relevance to the story. He’s far from the focus (even if he does prove to save the day, in what is the film’s only truly good scene), and sadly becomes a victim of a film that is simply far too poor to actually know what to do with him. The rest of the cast, mostly consisting of young actors like Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Victoria Wyant and Benjamin Cheng, is very poor, which is a result of both the underwritten characters and the actors not doing nearly enough to hold our attention. Roberts is so overly invested in trying to make every scene more gruesome from the last that he fails to distinguish between the characters – the backstories for these people are convoluted to the point of being frustrating, the connections between them entirely tenuous (and this isn’t even acknowledging some of the absolutely atrocious writing – no actor should have to endure this kind of dialogue that feels like it was generated by combining decades of poorly-written fan fiction) and the character motivations beyond weak. They do their best, but there’s only so much that any of them can do to overcome the very clear shortcomings that drive this narrative. They are not terrible actors in their own right, so we can at least hope that they will be able to deliver better performances in the future, under the guidance of a director who can actually use them effectively.

Primate is a film that does point towards quite a profound question, asking what it is that truly separates us from animals, which is a fascinating concept and one that does bear some relevance. Unfortunately, it never fully commits to exploring it with even an ounce of depth or clarity, leaving its central idea frustratingly underdeveloped. In many ways, the film tries to undermine humanity’s perceived superiority through suggesting that our intelligence and ability to not only develop language, but transfer that knowledge onto other animals, are far more fragile than anyone would care to admit. It offers little resistance when it comes to understanding the raw force of instinct, and leaves everything beyond shallow, which is an enormous disservice to an idea that is actually quite promising. It’s almost tragic how close Primate comes to turning into something meaningful, since there are clear hints that it understands nature not as malicious but rather as indifferent, a reactive force that challenges human suffering and presents it as a consequence of our own arrogance and tendency to overreach far beyond our limits. Rather than interrogating these ideas with nuance or restraint, Primate repeatedly falls back on excessive violence, resorting to shock tactics that ultimately dilute any thematic weight and reduce its premise to something far more superficial. The imbalance between concept and execution becomes the film’s defining flaw, taking a story rich with philosophical potential and rendering it a hollow, bland work that lacks focus and coherence, and loses any curiosity about its subject matter, taking what could’ve been a thought-provoking piece of natural horror and turning it into a lacklustre attempt at horror that brushes up against something insightful, only to retreat into an empty, bland violent disaster.