Primate (2026)

Johannes Roberts has spent a career sealing people into enclosed spaces with things that wish them harm, and Primate continues the tradition with a briskness that borders on rude. A rabid chimpanzee named Ben stalks a cliffside Hawaiian house, an infinity pool full of college students, and the family that raised him from infancy. Ninety minutes later, it is finished. The film has no interest in explaining itself, no interest in instruction, and no interest in anything beyond the mechanics of dread. This is intended as praise.

The ensemble deserves a moment of dispassionate note. Troy Kotsur plays Adam, the family patriarch and a celebrated novelist, and he is deaf, communicating in sign language for the duration. Johnny Sequoyah, who is Native American, leads as Lucy, and the supporting players come from a genuinely mixed pool. None of this is announced. The film never pauses to congratulate itself, and race remains a fact of casting instead of a subject of commentary. Deafness serves as texture and as a practical obstacle in the climax. Lucy survives because she is resourceful and because the genre demands a survivor, which is the oldest convention in horror and not a manifesto.

There is no messaging here, and the volume compensates. No climate anxiety, no indictment of wealth, no discourse about bodies, no reconsideration of the historical record. The chimp is the villain. The gore is the point. A father abandons a lucrative film deal to check on his daughters, and the screenplay treats this as a father checking on his daughters, nothing more. We are left with a film that trusts its audience to sit still for an animal attack and ask nothing further of it. Classification follows without difficulty: a lean, efficient specimen of the creature feature, and unserious in the best available sense.