“Primate” is a 2025 horror-thriller film about a family vacation that turns into a nightmare after their adopted chimpanzee, Ben, is bitten by a rabid animal and becomes violently dangerous.

Core premise

  • The story follows a family on a tropical holiday whose seemingly gentle pet chimp, Ben, suddenly turns aggressive after a bite from an infected animal.
  • As Ben’s behavior escalates from unsettling to lethal, the family’s attempt to contain him turns into a survival situation with classic creature-feature and slasher elements.

Tone and genre

  • The film is positioned as a killer -chimp creature feature that revives the animal-attack subgenre, mixing slasher structure with rabid-animal horror.
  • Reviews describe it as energetic, bloody, and “bananas,” playing into the shock value of a domesticated chimp turning on humans in confined spaces.

Main characters

  • Ben is the adopted chimpanzee whose infection drives the horror; he is portrayed by Miguel Torres Umba.
  • The core human cast includes Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), Hannah (Jessica Alexander), Adam (Troy Kotsur), and other family or close contacts trapped in the escalating violence around Ben.

Themes and ideas

  • The film leans into themes of humans treating wild primates as family members or pets and the consequences when that illusion breaks.
  • It also plays with fears around infection, loss of control, and being trapped with something that is both “almost human” and unpredictably animal.

Quick TL;DR

  • A family takes their adopted chimp Ben on a tropical vacation.
  • Ben is bitten by a rabid animal and becomes violently unstable.
  • The trip turns into a bloody survival fight against their once-beloved primate.

Information gathered from public data available on the internet and portrayed here.