Primate is a 2026 natural horror film directed by Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, Suicide Bid) and written by Roberts and Ernest Riera. It stars Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, and Troy Kotsur.

Lucy Pinborough (Sequoyah) returns to her Hawaiian abode for summer break, and to celebrate, throws a pool party for her friends and family while her deaf father, Adam (Kotsur), is away. Then she reveals to them her pet chimpanzee, Ben (Miguel Torres Umba), who was rescued by her mother and is now a part of the family. But the vacation becomes a struggle for survival when Ben is bitten by a rabid mongoose in the middle of the night, turning the once friendly and innocent chimp into a sadistic and violent monster that possesses a terrifying degree of intelligence.

The movie, produced by 18hz Productions and distributed by Paramount Pictures (also distributed under their Paramount Scares label) with additional assistance from Domain Entertainment, had its festival premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 18, 2025, and was released theatrically on January 9, 2026.

Previews: 911 Call Teaser👁 Image
| Official Trailer👁 Image

Primate includes examples of the following:

• Aborted Arc: The love triangle between Lucy, Hannah, and Nick goes absolutely nowhere due to Nick's death.
• Agony of the Feet: Lucy steps on a piece of glass but she covers her mouth to avoid screaming so Ben won't hear her.
• Anti-Villain: Ben was a kind, friendly chimp before being bitten by a rabid mongoose. As violent and cruel as he becomes, it isn't who he is as the disease both destroys his brain and aggravates his natural aggressive instincts.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Ben is depicted as a borderline unstoppable killing machine by virtue of being a chimpanzee pitted against humans. It's true that chimps are about 1.5 times as strong as a healthy adult human, with that strength concentrated areas like pulling and grip strength and a greater number of fast twitch muscles, which allows for explosive bursts of strength that allow them to do a lot of damage by grabbing, ripping and mauling their victim, but that same explosive strength also causes them to tire much faster. While Ben could almost certainly overpower and maul a person or two, he would likely not be capable of so tenaciously stalking and terrorizing his victims throughout the whole night as he did, as the repeated fighting, maiming and running would have been exhausting for him. Ben's strength is also somewhat exaggerated, especially for a chimp of his size ^note In the case of the most infamous chimpanzee attack, Travis the Chimp's mauling of Charla Nash, Travis was over 200 lbs/ 91 kg and absolutely massive compared to the average chimpanzee. Whereas Ben is much more modestly sized., given the ease with which he can rip entire jaws clean off.
  • The effects of rabies are extremely accelerated due to the film's Extremely Short Timespan. The intro states the disease is untreatable in 48 hours, but in reality rabies has an extremely lengthy incubation period of a few months and is treatable as long as you get vaccinated within ten days of infection. This seems to be primarily to justify why Ben is already symptomatic before anyone has any reason to think that anything is wrong.
  • It’s also questionable if a rabid chimp could still demonstrate Ben's intellect, especially since rabies is a disease that actively destroys the brain. Using a key fob to open a vehicle is one thing. Actively faking a personality shift to lure in a victim is quite another.
  • As a degenerative disease that destroys the brain, Ben's rabies should realistically manifest as feverish confusion with bouts of irrational fear and aggression. Rabies also causes symptoms like fatigue, nausea, partial paralysis, loss of coordination and hydrophobia, things that would actively weaken Ben's ability to act as a slasher villain. In the film, Ben's rabies infection functions more like a Hate Plague that causes him to undergo an actively sadistic and persistently violent personality shift, while otherwise keeping his mental faculties perfectly intact.
• Artistic License – Law: It is illegal to keep an ape as a pet in Hawaii👁 Image
  . How Lucy and her family managed to keep Ben for so long, we don't know.
• Attack the Injury: During the climax, Lucy is briefly able to prevent Ben from mauling her by jabbing her thumb into the infected mongoose bite wound, sending him running away in pain.
• Ax-Crazy: The rabies causes Ben to turn downright sadistic. He plays nice and friendly to lure in victims, and draws out kills to toy with his prey.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Despite Hannah having a small part of her scalp torn off by Ben, she still appears normal a few minutes later.
• Big Bad: Ben. A once-friendly chimp turns into a rabid, sadistic killer.
• Big Damn Heroes: Before Ben can tear Lucy's jaw off, Adam arrives just in time to distract Ben long enough for the father-daughter duo to kill the rabid primate.
• Bittersweet Ending: Erin, Lucy, and Adam manage to kill Ben and survive the ordeal. However, it's clear that they've been severely traumatized by what happened and several innocent people were horrifically killed. Even Ben himself was a Tragic Monster, turned from a friendly chimp into a savage beast by something beyond his control. Additionally, they could end up being sued by the families of the victims and possibly face criminal charges for owning a wild animal.
• Bloody Handprint: In the official logo for the movie in the trailer, the "P" has a bloodied ape handprint in place of a hole.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Pretty much everyone that Ben gets his hands on suffers this sort of fate. In just the first five minutes, he peels a man's face off while he's still alive.
• Dead Star Walking: Rob Delaney plays the veterinarian Lambert. He gets his face peeled off at the start of the movie.
• Death of Personality: Ben's rabies infection causes this in him, as Lucy acknowledges.
  Erin: Why is Ben doing this?
  Lucy: It's not Ben anymore.
• Disney Villain Death: Ben finally meets his end flying off a balcony and landing on top of a broken lawn chair leg, which impales him.
• Evil Laugh: Ben’s repeated hooting after he gets the better of Nick and throws him off the poolside cliff sounds disturbingly like laughter.
• Face–Monster Turn: In the trailer, Ben is shown to have started as a very sweet pet chimp, only to turn violent after being attacked in the middle of the night by a rabid animal.
• Facial Horror: Ben tears a poor guy's face off very early into the film.
• Foreboding Carcass: The mongoose that bit Ben is already a rotting carcass by the time it's shown onscreen, having been Killed Offscreen by Ben in self-defense, but the bite wound that it left on Ben is a sign of the danger that's about to befall everyone...
• Gorn: The movie does not shy away at all from showing just how strong a chimp is and how much damage one can do with its bare hands if it wanted to. More than simply being killed, Ben's victims are literally ripped to pieces on-screen in excruciating detail.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Despite the many gruesome onscreen kills, we are spared the sight of Ben bludgeoning Brad to death with a shovel.
• Handicapped Badass: Downplayed, but despite being deaf, Adam shows the now-completely murderous Ben that he is willing to take on a rabid chimpanzee if his daughters are in danger.
• Hate Plague: Rabies is depicted as less a degenerative disease and more a virus that flips a personality. More than just making Ben more aggressive, he becomes outright sadistic, repeatedly toying with his prey, people he once loved like family, deliberately making them suffer, and hunts them with far more persistence and cruelty than any normal animal would.
• Hope Spot: Two in the official trailer:
  • It is stated that Ben can't swim, so it's a clever move to go into the pool to ensure the rabid chimp doesn't get them. But while they're distracted on their phone trying to get help, they can be seen bobbing towards the edge of the pool, allowing Ben to grab one of them.
  • The car escape is much worse. Not only does one of the friends do the smart thing and lock the doors, but it's revealed a few seconds later that Ben, despite being rabid, is still intelligent to use a car key fob properly, unlocking the car, then opening the trunk.
• How We Got Here: The film opens with a veterinarian trying to give Ben a shot of antibiotics for his mongoose bite. Ben grabs him and peels his face off. Then the movie cuts to a few days before this happens and shows what led up to it (and then afterwards).
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Both Ben's human associates and absolute strangers he's never met beg him to remember the gentle chimp he once was, to no avail.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Ben dies by falling off a balcony trying to leap onto Lucy and lands on a broken lawn chair below, which pierces right through his chest.
• Insane Equals Violent: Being infected with rabies doesn't just drive Ben crazy, it specifically turns him into an outright sadistic predator that's driven to viciously kill every living thing he sees. Despite his infection, he still retains his intelligence, but now he uses it to stalk his prey, use deception to lure them in, and get very creative with his killing methods.
• Intelligent Primate: Ben is a chimpanzee, already known for intelligence, but is noted as especially intelligent even for them. Him becoming rabid just turns that intelligence into that of a slasher villain.
• It Can Think: The rabid Ben shows off a terrifying degree of intelligence in the trailer. Not only does he play affectionately with Lucy to provide a false sense of assurance before breaking her arm, he also knows which words to use on his tablet to communicate his intentions. And that's not getting into him knowing how to unlock a car automatically and opening its trunk. It's only natural, however, when you remember chimpanzees are considered some of the most intelligent animals alive and fully capable of deception, planning and deduction — and on top of that, Ben is implied to be a genius even by chimpanzee standards.
  • In the movie itself, Ben is consistently able to think at a near-human level, even as the rabies infection rots his brain. A rope only holds him for seconds before he works out how to get free. He seems to understand that his victims are trying to get to their phones and cars, and so he heads them off to wait in ambush. He even feigns a return to his previous personality to get Lucy to drop her guard.
• Jawbreaker: Ben kills one of his victims by ripping their jaw off. Then he mockingly plays with the detached mandible for a bit while the person bleeds out. He almost kills Lucy in the exact same way, but Adam is able to Draw Aggro and Ben turns his attention on him instead.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Hannah is not intended to be liked, but she instantly realizes the danger of Ben's condition and advocates having him shot immediately. Lucy is furious with her (and it doesn't help Hannah is romancing Nick whom Lucy likes), but Hannah is ultimately completely correct and Ben cannot be saved.
• Killer Gorilla: The trailer sets up the rabid chimp Ben as the main threat of the film.
• Made of Iron: Ben endures an insane amount of punishment without pausing. He gets strangled with a rope and doesn't even need to catch his breath afterwards. He gets repeatedly smashed in the head with a shovel and not only does he not get knocked down, the shovel breaks. He gets stabbed through the chest with a broken bottle and it only puts him down for a minute before he gets right back up. It's somewhat justified since he's a chimpanzee, which are a lot stronger than an average human, but these kinds of trauma should still be severely injuring Ben, if not outright killing him.
• Men Are the Expendable Gender: All of the deaths in the movie are quite brutal, but somehow the men's deaths end up being more violent and graphic than the female deaths in the movie. It doesn't help that out of the victims seen in the film, only two are female. The men overall were more daring and less afraid of Ben.
• My Car Hates Me: When one of the friends escapes the villa and gets into the car, she does the smart thing and locks it. But when she calls 911, the car unlocks. She locks it again, then it's revealed that Ben has a car key fob, and unlocks it again, and opens the trunk... In this case, it's justified because in her panic, she accidentally got into the wrong car, leaving her unable to start it.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: When Nick tries to push Ben over the side of cliff while in the pool, Ben simply grabs him and throws him over the side all the way down to his death, with his head graphically dashed against the rocks below.
• Oh, Crap!: While everyone is rightly nervous to see an obviously sick and erratic Ben loose in the house, they only realize how bad things are when Lucy tries to call Dr. Lambert… and they hear his phone ringing from Ben’s enclosure because Ben has already killed him.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Played with. Ben takes a massive bite out of Erin’s leg, which is treated as the serious and potentially life-threatening injury it is… until Lucy applies a tourniquet, at which point Erin is seemingly out of danger, and even able to walk when pressed.
• Papa Wolf: Upon seeing his daughters in trouble and after getting confirmation that Ben is too far gone, Adam wastes no hesitation in inflicting the same violence that the rabid chimp did to the others.
• Pint-Size Powerhouse: As a chimp, Ben is smaller than any of the people he interacts with, but he’s also far stronger, able to overpower any two of them.
• Police Are Useless: They would've arrived too late anyways, but when Hannah finally calls in for help and locking herself in a car, she soon realizes that she has the wrong keys for while Ben has the right ones, but the operator forgets to just track Hannah. Even after being informed by Hannah about the tracking, the operator still asks for a landmark and details. Cue Ben opening the car trunk.
• Race Against the Clock: After Erin gets bitten by Ben, the group's priority in finding a phone to call 911 becomes more frantic as Erin needs to be rushed to the hospital to receive a rabies shot.
• Rasputinian Death: Ben is pummeled with bottles, fists, shovels, stabbed in the chest, and ultimately plummets off the second floor to land on a table leg that impales him.
• Resist the Beast: Early into his infection Ben has bouts where he appears to return to his previous docile self, even seemingly trying to communicate that he feels sick, but it doesn't take long for the disease to consume him. Lucy's final attempt to reach out to him only results in a broken arm.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • For starters, it’s illegal to own chimpanzees as pets in many states, including Hawaii. How the Pinboroughs managed to adopt Ben is never revealed, other than Lucy’s deceased mother rescuing and using Ben as a project due to being a linguistics professor.
  • Ben is infected with rabies when he's bitten by a rabid mongoose. It's explicitly pointed out that Hawaii is a rabies-free region (which results in the post-mortem rabies test on the mongoose initially being assumed to be a false positive) but it's never explained how the mongoose contracted rabies to begin with.
• Robo-Speak: In the trailer, Ben uses a tablet and its text-to-speech function to communicate with the others. In the beginning, he says "Ben. Happy." to one of them. But when he goes rabid, he says:
  "Lucy. Bad. Bad. Bad."
• Sadist: When rabid, Ben’s violence goes far beyond reactive aggression and into willful, malicious cruelty. On multiple occasions, he deliberately draws out his attacks to frighten his victims as much as possible.
• Self-Disposing Villain: When a Not Quite Dead Ben tackles Lucy off the ledge overlooking the pool, she manages to grab onto the edge while he keeps falling, ultimately landing on a broken piece of furniture below, fatally impaling himself.
• Shown Their Work: Chimps really can be as intelligent as Ben demonstrates in the trailer, and getting into the pool is a viable strategy against him since chimps cannot swim (their increased muscle and bone mass causes them to sink like a rock). It's also pointed out that one of the symptoms of rabies is hydrophobia, giving its victims a strong aversion to water.
• Slasher Smile: Ben has one on his face after he kills Nick, practically taunting Kate with his hooting sounding like laughter.
• Tagline:
  • 18hz Reveal Poster: "Dangerously close to human."
  • Trailer: "They thought he was family."
• The Smurfette Principle: Inverted. Out of the main group, four of them are girls (Lucy, Hannah, Kate, Erin), and Nick is the only guy.
• Tear Off Your Face: Ben likes to go for the face when he kills, tearing and clawing at anything loose. He rips one man’s face completely free of his skull and tears another man’s lower jaw clean off.
• Too Dumb to Live: Seeing a free range pet chimpanzee should be a clear sign to any visitors to leave as soon as possible given the unpredictable nature and strength of a chimp even at the best of times. Sure enough, the bodies pile up when Ben becomes rabid.
  • Largely averted in the film itself. Ben’s family knows that he is potentially very dangerous and do their best to ensure that he is never loose or with strangers while unattended. When they suspect that he is sick, they lock him in his cage, call a vet, and bring the animal that bit him in for testing. Ben is only violent because of a disease totally unknown in the area and only out of his cage because of a momentary mistake by the vet. The main characters do take enormous risks to get their hands on a phone, but by then there’s no better option.
  • Nick tries to kill Ben by pushing him off the edge of the cliffside pool. The problem here is that since Ben is hydrophobic, Nick would have been able to easily accomplish this by simply splashing water at Ben. This single choice gets him killed in front of his horrified sister and her friends.
  • After taking such a huge risk to retrieve a phone inside the house and narrowly escape from Ben, Lucy and Kate remain behind to hold down the back door. A glass door which is the only thing keeping them apart from Ben. Even when Ben seemingly gives up, Lucy and Kate just stare at him instead of running away. It takes them about a couple minutes to realize what a dumb move it is, just as Ben runs through the glass doorway and chases after the girls. While Lucy manages to come out of the ordeal alive, Kate isn’t as fortunate to get away from Ben’s wrath.
  • Drew and Brad, having been invited by the girls to a supposed party, arrive to find the house dead quiet and seemingly abandoned. Rather than take in any of the suspicious warning signs that something isn't right, they proceed to blunder about loudly only concerned with getting laid, which predictably gets them both killed in short order when Ben finds them. Beforehand, they also failed to notice that their friends were in distress after calling them nor do they seem to take the phone call getting abruptly cut off as a sign that something is wrong, resulting in them being unaware of any danger beforehand.
• Tragic Mistake: Hannah sadly did not make certain which vehicle she got into and ends up in the boys' car instead of her own. Even worse, she clicks the lock to check, which make a very audible noise. Sure enough, Ben is alerted, comes to investigate, and brought the keys just in case.
• Tragic Monster: Ben is a friendly, loving chimpanzee driven insane by rabies. The disease plays havoc with his mind and he views everyone around him as "bad" and thus fair game to murder.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The veterinarian who enters Ben’s enclosure to treat him forgets to lock the door behind him. Ben kills him and leaves through the unlocked door, which is the only reason he was able to kill anyone else.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Discussed briefly as an option to deal with Ben, when Hannah suggests it. Lucy is appalled, and they apparently don’t have a gun anyway. Considering rabies is a disease that is a death sentence as soon as symptoms appear, it is not an unreasonable suggestion. That said, they didn’t know he had rabies at that moment — all they knew was that he was sick and acting strangely.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Ben plays at being sorry and returning to his old self, solely to lure Lucy into a false sense of security.