Sitges 2025: Johannes Roberts’ ‘Primate’ is Angry Chimp Brutal Horror
by Alex Billington
October 13, 2025
There’s a brand new apes movie coming to theaters soon. Though this one is definitely not for the faint of heart. Primate is a freaky, brutal, wild new horror movie from genre filmmaker Johannes Roberts. After premiering at this year’s Fantastic Fest & Beyond Fest, it’s next playing at the 2025 Sitges Film Festival and other fests around the world before it crashes in theaters in January next year. Roberts is already a horror cinema veteran – he also directed the two 47 Meters Down shark movies, along with Forest of the Damned, Storage 24, The Other Side of the Door, The Strangers: Prey at Night, and 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Primate is something new – even though it seems like a familiar concept, about a usually calm, cuddly pet turning into an evil killing machine, we’ve never seen a horror movie just like this before. Which is an exciting experience. A chimpanzee living with a family inside their gorgeous, huge home located on a cliff in Hawaii contracts rabies and goes mad, stalking and murdering the people who are there. It’s as cheesy as any good horror movie should be, but also crazy scary & disturbing to watch. I had a blast with it.
This movie plays like if the Planet of the Apes alternate universe society made their own horror movie about a chimp going mad and killing humans. Primate is directed by Johannes Roberts, featuring a screenplay co-written by Ernest Riera and Johannes Roberts. Actress Johnny Sequoyah stars as Lucy, daughter of an animal researcher and writer, who returns to her home in Hawaii. Her dad, played by Troy Kotsur, heads away for the weekend so she invites her friends to come over and hang out and party. When their pet chimp gets rabies, it turns vicious, attacking them and anyone that comes near it. So they hide out in the pool and try to figure out how to outsmart and get around the chimp. But it has turned into one mean bastard – with extraordinary strength and ability to climb around the house. This whole movie is WAY better than it should be! Featuring proper frightening horror filmmaking, exceptionally creative cinematography (so many cool shots from DP Stephen Murphy), extremely fucked up kills aplenty. Yet it’s still highly entertaining. The right amount of comedy with sheer intensity + especially gory violence. I even think the cliche horror stuff works as levity and as an homage to how cheesy fun horror can be even when it’s still scary as hell to watch.
It’s Chimp Rabies Mayhem! I’m most impressed by the top notch filmmaking and how they pulled off this concept. The angry chimp in this movie doesn’t look like it’s entirely CGI, too many scenes with it that look real. But it also can’t be a real chimp, there’s no way they could get an actual live chimp to act and perform like this while viciously attacking people. Plus, Hollywood’s animal safety rules would never allow it. So it must be a man-in-suit concept? Someone is portraying this chimp and acting like him? Following the recent Planet of the Apes movies this seems entirely possible. That’s the only way they could make this all look and feel so damn real. Bravo if that’s how they did this. And it’s ultimately not even about the realism anyway. The best shots in the movie are all the shots of the rabies-infested chimp looking so deranged and evil that even Michael Myers would be shaking under his mask. One could argue that Primate does have commentary about the dangers of having wild animals as pets, not to mention animal safety in general and figuring out how to stop an animal-gone-mad before it harms anyone or anything. But that’s overthinking it. It’s really just a fun horror movie concept that succeeds as 89 minute escapism / totally F’ed up genre entertainment.
I also need to give an additional shoutout. This also co-stars Troy Kotsur as the dad (again) and honestly – this is my favorite Troy Kotsur performance since CODA. A number of really great scenes with him that play out near perfectly. The way they use his Deaf POV sometimes is brilliant and that was also unexpected. I love him as an actor even more after this, and I didn’t think that was possible. They got so lucky casting him. It might be too ridiculous for some viewers, but I think this pet-chimp-gone-mad horror flick totally rocks.
Alex’s Sitges 2025 Rating: 8 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing
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