Sorry, couldn’t resist. But in fact, those four words could serve as the entire synopsis for the 2025 “natural horror” film, Primate, a surprisingly watchable film for its genre.
SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH BEN
Indeed there is, and with that tagline, here is a brief overview. The shock opening finds us at a remote cliffside house in Hawaii, where a veterinarian enters an outdoor animal enclosure to call on Ben, a family’s pet chimpanzee. Ben promptly rips off his face and kills him.
Flash backward 36 hours, where we meet the Pinborough family and their gentle, lovable pet chimp, named Ben. Lucy Pinborough, a college student, is coming home for the first time in a long while, and bringing some friends, as well as a gift for Ben—a teddy bear, which he loves. Ben is quite intelligent and is even able to communicate via soundboard software on a tablet, as well as sign language, the latter in deference to Adam Pinborough, Lucy’s dad, a famous deaf novelist.
Lucy is terrified of her once beloved pet.
On Lucy’s first night home, Ben begins acting a bit strangely. Adam finds a dead mongoose in Ben’s enclosure. Concerned that it might be rabid, he says that he’ll take it to a lab for testing when he leaves for a book signing the next day.
ANYONE FOR A SWIM?
Lucy and friends spend the next day partying in and around the infinity pool, while the story catches up to the killing of the veterinarian. After dark, Ben is found shambling around the house. How did he get out of his enclosure? Lucy wonders. But when he kills one of her friends, she realizes that they have a major problem.
Lucy tries to protect her sister.
Knowing that Ben is hydrophobic and cannot go into the water, she orders everyone into the pool. They’re safe—for the moment, while Ben stalks the perimeter. But they have no means of communication, all of their cell phones charging in their rooms. Oh crap.
Therein lies the majority of the tension-charged story, which scored 77% on Rotten Tomatoes. Its consensus read, “That’s one bad ape, and Primate is one lean, mean, effective chiller.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.