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Published 15:41 30 Jul 2026 BST
Updated 10:43 31 Jul 2026 BST

Primate, one of our first 5/5 movies of 2026, has just been made available to stream at home.
Released in cinemas in January and now streaming on Paramount+, the horror thriller is directed by B-movie maestro Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down, The Strangers: Prey at Night) and stars the Oscar-winning Troy Kotsur (CODA).
Set in Hawaii, the film follows two sisters, Erin and Lucy (Gia Hunter and Johnny Sequoyah), whose mother died the previous year. The matriarch was a linguistics professor who had a pet chimpanzee named Ben to help with her studies.
The animal still lives with the siblings and their famous novelist father, Adam (Kotsur). While the dad is away at a book signing and the older sister Lucy invites some friends over, Ben begins acting erratically.
It turns out that the chimp has been bitten by a mongoose, giving him rabies. As Ben becomes increasingly violent, Erin and Lucy's get-together becomes a terrifying fight for survival.
You may be surprised to read that this horror thriller about a pet chimpanzee turning on its owners is one of our favourite movies of 2026 so far. But we're being genuine.
We saw Primate last year in Dublin's IFI cinema as part of Horrorthon, where it was the festival's surprise film. The screening was one of the liveliest we've ever been to, with the horror thriller provoking jumps and screams, as well as laughs and cheers from the audience.
That's because Primate is an 89-minute mean-and-lean genre movie that knows exactly what it is, wringing maximum dark humour and sustained tension from its diabolic premise.
Doing for apes what Jaws did for sharks, we were on the edge of our seats throughout.
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