The January horror movie always has an uphill battle to fight. The January horror film has rightly the earned the reputation of being unbearably awful. However, in the last few years, the horror movie has been quietly reclaiming the month of January with better-than-expected films like M3GAN, Presence and Companion. The trailers for Johannes Roberts’ Primate looked terrible, like the January-est of January horror movies. But early buzz was good after the film premiered at last year’s Fantastic Fest, so I was open to enjoying whatever this was. And luckily, 2026 is kicking off with another better-than-expected January horror movie.

Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) is traveling to her home in Hawaii with some friends. Her mother, a linguistics professor, has recently died and her relationship with her father (CODA’s Troy Kotsur) and younger sister (Gia Hunter) isn’t as close as it once was. The late matriarch worked with a chimpanzee named Ben, who has effectively become a member of the family. When Ben is bitten by a rabid mongoose, all hell breaks loose.

The trailers for Primate reminded me of a fake movie trailer from something like 30 Rock or The Studio. It seemed to carry on the trend of over the top, absurdist horror/comedy movies like last year’s The Monkey. I will say Primate threads the needle of leaning into absurdity and B-movie camp, and also being about something that could totally happen. If an animal like Ben became rabid, it could totally go on a killing spree. The violence in Primate is super gory, brutal and over the top. And the movie is very dumb, but very aware of its own stupidity, and because of that, I give most of what happens here a pass. 

The performances here are mostly nothing special, but everyone is doing perfectly adequate work. Audiences might remember Johnny Sequoyah from the 2021 Dexter revival, but I’d never seen her before. She doesn’t make a strong impression, but her performance isn’t weak enough to bring the movie down. And I hadn’t seen Troy Kotsur since his Oscar-winning role in CODA, and of course there have to be limited roles in Hollywood for deaf actors. But this film makes good use of what he does well, even if he kind of disappears for half the movie. Miguel Torres Umba plays the titular chimp in a motion-capture performance, and considering how low the budget of this film must have been, the end result looks fairly seamless. 

Johannes Roberts, who made the very intense 47 Meters Down, is our director and co-writer, and credit must be given for how entertaining this whole thing is. To be fair, at a lean runtime of under 90 minutes, we shouldn’t have a lot of downtime, but it feels like this movie passes in the blink of an eye. That’s a telltale sign of a filmmaker who has a solid understanding of the rules of pacing. The film doesn’t waste any time getting to the gruesome brutality, and it communicates this to the viewer in the film’s opening moments, making you fully aware of what you’re getting yourself into. I also must mention the fantastic, very John Carpenter-ish score by Adrian Johnston. This synth-heavy score allows the film to lean further into the 1980s B-movie aesthetic it’s clearly going for. The sound design is also terrific, making very effective use of silence. 

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by Primate. It’s not breaking new ground in the world of horror, but it does what it does very well, and has lots of tension and jump scares that are actually effective. It strikes a good balance of committing to the absurdist almost Grindhouse movie aesthetic, but also never becoming too ridiculous. Primate is a lean, brisk and brutal good time, and for a horror movie released in early January, this was miles above what I went in expecting.