Primate

Bluesky

Our scene is set in Hawaii, a group of young people gathering without adult supervision. It's a big house, quickly and efficiently setting our scene in isolation and perched on a precipice. In classic slasher fashion there's some drinking, some drug use, a bit of promiscuity. Primate joins a litany of creature features. We've had lions, tigers, even chemically assisted bears. To menace them, from the menagerie? Ben the chimpanzee.

There are a couple of cameos, but what Primate is pulling off is more than famous faces. It'd be reductive to suggest that this was King Kong by way of Halloween, but the film is at least as efficient. Ernest Riera has previously helped set up similar mousetraps, 47 Meters Down among them. Director Johannes Robert, who co-writes again with Riera, might have drawn inspiration from videogame series Resident Evil, or perhaps more specifically Alone In The Dark.

Adrian Johnstone's score is heavy on the synths, and there's more than one or two notes of similarity to John Carpenter's work, David Cronenberg's too. Ben, you see, is rabid. That's not a spoiler, to be clear - a wall of text at the beginning explains hydrophobia. It's much more of the box office than biology, but from Cujo onwards the needs of story outweigh any requirement for accuracy.

Primate's set up is neatly drawn. Beyond biology we've got the gamut from architecture to coastlines to deafness. Lucy (Johnny Sequoia) is returning home with friends. That house is massive, the walls covered in framed covers for the books of her father (Troy Kostur). Actual author Joe Abercrombie turns up at a meeting with him after a signing, all part of the process of isolating our cast so they can be cut down. Kostur and his character are both deaf, and sign language is a key element of the film's various forms of representation. It's not just old fashioned but retrograde that there's a dead mother in the mix. Among the conveniently labelling greetings, "my brother's here!" is other exposition that tells us she was a linguist and brought a chimpanzee home one day. Among the bits of text are clippings of newspaper headlines, as Ben's signing is significant, as is his use of a talking board.

There are some lovely touches with sound design, some horrifying moments with makeup and visual effects, and a fair few scares. Devilish dilemmas are at least as old as rocks and hard places, but if Primate isn't novel it is inventive. Having mentioned Carpenter and Cronenberg it'd be fair to throw in Stephen King too, though visual effects now are such that disbelief isn't so much suspended as carried away.

Ben might not be real, but it's hard to tell. For sure there are efficiencies borrowed from other directors, there are ways to convey presence without it being on screen. Using tools sharpened by others doesn't lessen the craft involved. The pieces the film sets up for its set pieces might not be unique, but the freshness of those combinations divides it from many inferior features. I didn't go in with high expectations but I was thrilled. While Primate might not be doing anything massively new it's having bloody fun with it.

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