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Paramount Pictures flung open the cage earlier today with the official trailer for its upcoming horror film, Primate. Judging by the footage, the film straddles the line between slasher thrills and absurdist humor, leaning into the ridiculousness of its premise with gleeful abandon that’s bound to put curious butts in seats to see how its story unfurls.
Directed by Johannes Roberts and co-written by Ernest Riera and Johannes Roberts, Primate‘s trailer starts innocuously enough, barring the pre-trailer thing all movies tend to do, laying out its premise before letting you know the trailer you clicked on is about to start. After the pre-trailer teaser, which features a 911 call with a chimpanzee howling in the background as a caller tells the operator, “He killed all the others,” we see a group of college students relaxing in a lavish vacation house in Hawaii. After dipping in the pool and taking in the sights, one of the teens, Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), introduces her friends to their family chimp, Ben (Miguel Torres Umba). As you do.
We get a brief exposition about one of the teen’s scientist mothers rescuing a chimp as a baby and treating it as part of the family, with a vibe reminiscent of Rise of the Planet of the Apes meets Nope. At this point, all we need to know is that the chimp’s CGI falls somewhere between those two films, it has one of those text-to-speech soundboard tablets that TikTok dog moms rave about for their pets, and that Ben is happy…until he isn’t. Something flips his switch, and he starts going ape shit on the teens, kicking off their daring attempt to survive the psycho pet monkey.
Credit where it’s due—Primate‘s official trailer wisely withholds the twist on what mysterious thing bites Ben and sets the now evil monkey on a vindictive rampage against the unsuspecting kids. That level of restraint helps sell the film’s peculiar balancing act as part home-invasion horror and part gleeful send-up to animals breaking bad. Scenes where the kids devise a plan to jump into the pool to escape Ben, because he can’t swim, only for him to hurl insults via iPad, really ride that line on horror and comedy. Also, the final beat of the trailer, where Lucy hides in a locked car—until Ben casually presses the key fob, unlocks the door, and makes sure she watches him do it, is such a funny bit, it’s unclear whether the film wants you to double over laughing or clench your chair at how menacing Ben is. Still, it’s bound to be entertaining like M3GAN was before it went all Terminator 2 on us.
Folks will have to wait and see what the monkey do when Primate releases in theaters on January 9.
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