Primate 2025

It was a pleasant surprise to see Troy Kotsur here. After CODA, I didn’t expect to see him pop up in this kind of suspense setup, and that casting choice immediately caught my attention. I watched the R16 cut, and what stood out most was how much the score does the heavy lifting. The music is constantly at work, sustaining unease and signaling danger even when the frame itself is quiet. It tells you when to feel uncomfortable, when to anticipate something going wrong, and when to brace yourself. Without it, the tension would probably collapse. Conceptually, the whole setup feels like The Shallows, trapped in a more enclosed space with a predator. It’s a contained, survival focused suspense film that relies on proximity and pressure. The threat feels close, persistent, and unavoidable, which is where most of the tension comes from. That said, this is also one of those suspense movies where the characters can be frustratingly dumb. They keep the lights off, make questionable decisions, and repeatedly choose the worst possible options. You find yourself thinking, “Why would you do that?” more often than you’d like. It does increase tension, but it also leads to a lot of facepalm moments that pull you slightly out of the experience. In the end, it’s a straightforward suspense watch. Nothing groundbreaking, nothing that reinvents the genre, but it does what it sets out to do. If you’re in the mood for something tense, contained, and driven more by atmosphere than ideas, it works well enough.