Primate is one of the worst creature features I have ever seen. Before we get into the ‘analysis’ segment, I am not mincing words, because I am well aware that the film has a bizarrely inflated critical score on Rotten Tomatoes et al. But whatever the producers did to cow their tame critics on this occasion, you should not let the targeted marketing around this movie tempt you into paying to see it. And maybe it is worth considering what its reframing of untameable animals as the problem says, as business and political leaders look to excuse economic practices which will cause the annihilation of the natural world.
Something’s wrong with Ben. So claims the tagline of the promotional poster for Primate, anyway. But as anyone even remotely acquainted with the way animals respond to captors who beat and torment them into behaving in a way palatable to humans knows – you can only fuck about for so long, before you find out.
The people killed by orcas (something never recorded in the wild), driven mad by their ‘training’ and bleak empty tanks in US theme parks; the countless lion ‘tamers’ who have been mauled during circus performances; even Siegfried and Roy suddenly finding the tables turned on them by the tiger they wrongly assumed they’d beaten all the fight out of. And yes, people who think they can make a chimpanzee – our closest living relative; supremely intelligent, and an apex predator in its own right – into a ‘pet’. So, if Ben – the chimp at the heart of this sub-by-the-numbers horror – really did start tearing people’s faces off, would that really be so unprecedented? Would there actually be something wrong with Ben defending himself from a psychotic family of wealthy Americans, who deafen him with whistles and confine him to a tiny cell any time he behaves like anything other than a big friendly dog?
The conceit of Primate is that it only works as any kind of narrative if you answer the above with yes. Yes, there must be something wrong with a wild animal lashing out at innocent owners when backed into a nightmarish corner like this. Can’t he see the deed of ownership? Their tropical pets license? Get over it Ben. Wear the baby clothes, the adult diaper, and dance around when we command… In fact, the film’s ideological certainty of this is so iron-clad, that the script – or the napkin-notes they used in lieu of one – decides we need an additional reason why a chimpanzee would ever behave like this.
Cujo with a chimp
Ben catches rabies from a mongoose which wandered into his pen. And that means we can all sigh “ohhh, that’s alright then” because suddenly there is no more moral quandary. It’s not that the chimp doesn’t like being there, that he doesn’t want to wear human clothes, be forced to ‘speak’ with a child’s toy, or be temporarily deafened with a whistle any time he acts slightly like the animal he is. Who WOULDN’T like that? No. Ben is sick, he is sick and needs to be put down. Any violence against him is now an act of mercy, one we should all be on board with.
Even so, the fact remains, Ben is held captive by a family of white colonisers, in a mansion on a Hawaiian cliff-top, where they torture him on the daily. But let’s not get bogged down in that fact, because really this is about family. The story follows the family’s oldest child as she returns home, after a period of tension resulting from her mother’s death. Her father, an author who is deaf and communicates through sign-language, welcomes her warmly, but hints that the family worried they might not see the daughter again – or at least for a while – establishing a precedent for this character to run away from familial responsibilities when times get tough.
By the end of the film, this character will have seen several people meet extremely grisly ends, but also rally to the defence of her younger sister in spite of the clear danger she puts herself in. Generously, you might suggest this is the only arc which the movie both establishes and delivers on. But you might also very reasonably counter this with the fact a broken clock is right twice a day, and the more shit a chimp hurls around its enclosure, the greater the likelihood that something will stick.
And there certainly is a lot of excrement thrown in the direction of various walls, to that end. In the plodding first act – which is written with so little faith in its audience’s attention-span that it has to be pre-empted by a flash-forward; which absolutely castrates any sense of tension or mystery about what is happening later – we also are shown the following. The lead character has brought her best-friend to the island, and the pair have grown apart. Perhaps a coming traumatic experience might help them to reconnect? The lead character has also invited a male friend who she likes, but who might not be the nicest person. Maybe the approaching events could show ways in which the relationship would not work out, but within the metaphorical context of a life-or-death scenario? The best friend, due to her disconnection with our lead, has also invited another of her loud and obnoxious friends, who is plainly unwelcome, and who ends up making out with the male friend. Perhaps the scenario could actually lead to this person bonding with our ‘hero’ after getting off on the wrong foot, and having a redemption arc?
Don’t hold your breath for any of that. People come and go from this film without incident. Expectations are built up and then immediately dashed, like the brains of a teenage love-interest on the rocks below a Hawaiian clifftop mansion. And all the while, even though these are thoroughly dislikeable (arguably morally reprehensible) people, even without these mitigating factors, Primate expects us to root for them, and demonise Ben. Looking (if you can) beyond the elephant in the room of chimp ownership – something only directly addressed by a temporary character written to be an disposable and dislikeable moron – the film fails even on the basis of delivering the basic A-B storytelling so often rolled out in the creature feature sub-genre, which most other films there understand is essential, because animals are generally more likeable than us!
Absence of humanity
Animals running amok in a human environment pit humans against a natural world modern society is increasingly desperate to escape every facet of – while also forcing those characters to reconcile with the animalistic instincts they can never rid themselves of, and harness them to be more complete people. It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s better than nothing – and more than Primate manages. Not for lack of trying, because in the third act the film seems to catch sight of itself and realise that, stylish as the gore, and decent as the chimp costume might be, it is utterly devoid of the human element that will make it even slightly more compelling than a YouTube animal attack montage. And after that realisation, it attempts to deliver on another arc – just not one anyone was geared to cheer for – as suddenly we get a resolution to a ‘neglectful father’ story that didn’t in any way manifest earlier.
All this is to say, I don’t understand what anyone is supposed to get from Primate, that they couldn’t get from re-watching the traumatic opening sequence of Nope – which is ultimately more horrific, but without trying to tie the action up in a neat, uncontroversial bow for its audience to consume passively, and without asking difficult questions about animal ownership under capitalism. Even after the nightmarish, squelchy beatings unleashed by a chimp in Nope, the sequence manages to leave ambiguity in its conclusion – an implication that the animal was just behaving naturally after being startled, in an environment where it had been aggressively compelled to mask its chimpness for the expedience of a cultural commodity. And that it is still capable of something other than bestial violence. Primate doesn’t want you to think about any of that – although anyone with half a conscience and a few brain cells will still think of that – it just wants you to be scared about this alleged monster.
What that says about the state of cultural hegemony might also be concerning. This film that critics seem oddly willing to give a pass to because of “the kind of film it is” are overlooking the complex ways this kind of horror can make us think and feel, when the effort is made. And they are further normalising a sense that actually, sometimes humans just need to conquer nature, to tame and own beasts, because it’s us or them. And as the world rolls back regulations protecting endangered species, destroys habitats, and forges ahead with a climate-busting energy system which will cause nature’s utter collapse, the idea that any kind of animalistic pushback against ‘human’ norms is monstrous or wrong is a troubling one.
There is something wrong, but maybe it’s not with Ben…