Primate

Story:

Johannes Roberts, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ernest Riera, is the director of the 2025 American natural horror film Primate. Troy Kotsur, Jessica Alexander, and Johnny Sequoyah are the main actors. In the movie, an adoptive chimpanzee named Ben gets bitten by a rabid animal and turns vicious, ruining a tropical vacation.

Primate debuted at the Fantastic Fest on September 18, 2025, and Paramount Pictures released it in theaters on January 9, 2026. The movie is the fourth highest-grossing movie of 2026 after earning $31 million globally and receiving largely favorable reviews from critics.

Plot

Doug Lambert, a veterinarian, is killed by a chimpanzee that tears off his face as he enters an outdoor animal enclosure at a property in a remote area of Hawaii.

A young college student named Lucy Pinborough arrives at an airport 36 hours earlier to return to her Hawaiian home after years away. Longtime friends Kate and Nick are with her, but she is shocked to hear that Kate has unexpectedly invited Hannah as a guest. The buddies encounter Drew and Brad, two college-age men who want to party in Hawaii, while

After arriving in Hawaii, the pals take a car to Lucy’s beautiful mansion, which is set into a cliff. Adam, her well-known literary father, is deaf and mostly uses sign language to communicate. Erin, Lucy’s sister, laments that Lucy has been gone for too long. The chimpanzee turns out to be Ben, the family’s pet; Lucy’s late mother, a linguistics professor, taught him to speak using specialized soundboard software on a tablet. Ben is quite smart. When Lucy gives him a teddy bear, he is ecstatic they are boarding.

Ben starts behaving suspiciously later that evening. Adam finds a dead mongoose in Ben’s enclosure and realizes that Ben was bitten by it. He wants Lambert to see how Ben is doing before heading out to take part in a book signing since he intends to take the mongoose to a lab the next morning to do tests. Later in the day, a now-rabid Ben murders Lambert and breaks out of his cage as the pals are having a party by the outdoor infinity pool situated at the brink of the cliff.

Later that night, after everyone has gone to bed, Kate awakens to discover Ben wandering aimlessly. She alerts Lucy out of fear, only to discover Ben has disappeared. When Lucy picks up Ben’s teddy bear, she discovers that it has blood on it. The girls hear a disturbance coming from the pool and discover Ben acting aggressively towards Nick and Hannah. After getting Ben to settle down, Lucy and Nick attempt to bind him with a rope. This backfires, setting off a violent outburst in which everyone leaps into the pool and Ben bites Erin on the leg. Ben, who can’t swim and is hydrophobic, stalks the pool’s edge while keeping an eye on the others.

Nick tries to shove Ben off when he jumps to the pool’s cliff-facing edge, but Ben tosses him over the edge and kills him.Until Lucy finds a big pool float that allows them to rest safely, Ben seeks methods to hurt the others in different ways.Ben had vanished by the time the friends wake up. Kate goes with Lucy on a quest to get a smartphone from the living room, but Ben kills her by hitting her skull with a rock. Adam ignores the lab’s text message informing him that the mongoose tested positive for rabies, but after Lucy doesn’t respond to his texts, he decides to back out of a possible movie deal and leaves for home.

Unaware of the danger, Drew and Brad arrive at the house after being invited by the girls earlier and look around for the females. Ben corners Drew in Lucy’s bedroom and rips off his jaw, killing him. When Brad discovers the girls outside, Ben ambushes him and uses a shovel to beat him to death. Hannah enters the home covertly, takes out her car keys and smartphone, and dashes outside, only to get into the wrong vehicle. Ben gets the right keyfob and uses it to get into the car, killing her as she frantically begs a 911 operator to send police to the residence.

When Adam gets to the house, he fights off Ben with Lucy and Erin’s assistance, stabbing him with a broken wine bottle. The family embraces since they think they murdered Ben, but Ben assaults Lucy and throws them both over a balcony. While Ben falls and is fatally impaled by a broken chair leg, Adam saves Lucy. The police and physicians, having traced Hannah’s call, arrive as the family heals in the front yard. Adam and Lucy convince Erin that she will never be alone again as they transport her to the hospital. When an officer unintentionally plays the line “Lucy bad” while gathering Ben’s soundboard for evidence, Lucy is shocked.