Tovic Salvador

‘Primate’ review: The illusion of control, violently corrected

Article (news)

Ralph Revelar Sarza

<div><img src="https://od2-image-api.abs-cbn.com/prod/editorImage/1768885945791primate.jpg" style="width:960px" class="fr-fic fr-dib" width="960"/>A scene from &#x27;Primate&#x27;</div>I went into “Primate” expecting another clever indictment of pet culture, something sharp, maybe even smug. What Johannes Roberts delivers instead is a 90-minute wrecking ball aimed directly at the very idea of the “pet.”For decades, cinema has been a convenient mirror for our neuroses about the animal kingdom, dressing beasts in the drag of human emotion. We want them to love us, to understand us, to validate our shaky position at the top of the food chain. I am not exempt from this impulse. Roberts takes that cozy, narcissistic delusion and grinds it into the expensive floorboards of a sleek, glass-walled suburban fortress. This film bites the hand that feeds, tears the arm off, and insists that “domestication” is nothing more than a temporary truce. Even then, the word feels generous.The plot follows a logic that the film treats as biological inevitability. A high-achieving family, the kind that buys smart homes and curates a life for maximum aesthetic appeal, raises Ben, a chimpanzee, as a human surrogate. Troy Kotsur plays the father with heartbreaking restraint, portraying a man who genuinely believes his bond with Ben transcends species. He is wrong, but the film is careful, even cruelly patient, in showing us why he believes he isn’t.When a viral outbreak strips away the animal’s learned inhibitions, the film abandons the pretense of family drama and becomes something colder and less metaphorical: a confrontation with Darwinian reality that refuses to dress itself up as allegory.What makes “Primate” work — when it works, and it often does — is its refusal to hide behind the weightless safety of CGI. Roberts opts for a performer in a practical suit, which restores a terrifying physicality to the screen. You feel the displacement of air. You hear the thud of muscle against marble. You see the erratic, predatory intelligence behind the eyes. There is a specific horror in watching a creature that once sat for a family portrait transform into a three-hundred-pound engine of destruction. It bypasses the uncanny valley entirely and settles somewhere lower.The setting, a house built almost entirely of glass, serves as a blunt metaphor for human hubris. We build these transparent cages because they make us feel enlightened, connected to nature without having to negotiate with it. We want the view without the mosquitoes, the majesty without the teeth. Roberts turns this architecture into a trap. The family sees their fate approaching from across the lawn, but their open-concept living offers no sanctuary. The house becomes a panoramic prison, where visibility is not power but provocation.The film’s true cruelty lies in its intellectual chill. It offers no sentimental exit. There is no moment of nostalgic mercy where the animal remembers his “father” and hesitates. To expect that, the film suggests, is the ultimate human arrogance, and Roberts punishes that expectation relentlessly. The violence is chaotic and uncomfortably intimate. It strips away the teenagers’ digital detachment, forcing children raised on screens to confront a reality that cannot be muted, filtered, or swiped away. They are helpless because they have grown up believing the world is responsive. It isn’t.“Primate” refuses the shape of a hero’s journey and settles instead into the cold, incurious logic of the food chain. It leaves us amid the wreckage of a shattered sanctuary, contemplating how thin and fragile our civilization really is. When the glass finally breaks, there is no moral lesson waiting underneath. There is only debris. And silence.The ending feels almost contemptuous of modern horror’s need for reassurance. I can’t remember the last time a creature feature felt this uninterested in my comfort, or this committed to denying the fantasy that control can ever be reclaimed. <div> </div>This review was originally published on the author’s website “<a href="https://www.walphs.com/2026/01/primate-movie-review.html">WALPHS.com</a>.”

'Primate' is a creature feature that bites back — hard — rejecting sentiment, allegory, and comfort in favor of raw, Darwinian terror.

'Primate' is a creature feature that bites back — hard — rejecting sentiment, allegory, and comfort in favor of raw, Darwinian terror.