TL;DR: A lean, mean, gloriously nasty killer-chimp ride that knows exactly why you bought the ticket and starts throwing jaws like party favors. It’s not deep and it’s not trying to be, but the practical creature work and cruel little set pieces make it a giddy, gross crowd-pleaser if you can vibe with “beautiful Hawaii house” plus “everybody makes dumb choices” energy.

Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) comes home to her family’s remote cliffside place in Hawaii to reconnect with her dad Adam (Troy Kotsur) and younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter) after their mom’s death. Also living there is Ben, the family’s adopted chimp, raised to communicate with them through sign language and a device. When Ben is bitten by a rabid mongoose, the weekend turns into a survival scramble as Lucy, Erin, and friends Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Hannah (Jessica Alexander), plus childhood pal Nick (Benjamin Cheng), try to escape a house that suddenly feels like a deadly luxury cage.

Johannes Roberts has been grinding in the slick, high-concept genre lane for a while, bouncing between lean creature-thriller mechanics and glossy studio horror, including the shark panic of 47 Meters Down and the neon mean-streak of The Strangers: Prey at Night, plus franchise work like Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. Here, he leans hardest into his “efficient thrill machine” mode: contained location, clear rules, and a monster that does not negotiate. Ernest Riera, Roberts’ co-writer here, shares that same pulpy, forward-thrusting sensibility. Together they make a film that feels built to play loud with a crowd, not to win an essay contest.

Ben. That’s the whole sermon. The movie’s main flex is how present the chimp feels, like an actual physical threat occupying the same air as the cast instead of a weightless digital blur. When the film is cooking, it weaponizes the intimate horror of “something you loved is now wrong,” then immediately cashes that dread into splatter. There’s a nasty pleasure in how it keeps switching gears between suspense and sudden animal violence, the kind that makes you laugh because your brain is trying to file a complaint and can’t find the right department. The best moments are simple and cruel: characters clinging to a single safe option, then realizing the safe option is also a trap.

This thing is a tight 89-minute punch to the face, and the pacing is basically “setup, bite, scream, regroup, bite again,” which is honestly the correct cadence for January horror junk food. Roberts and cinematographer Stephen Murphy shoot the house like a gleaming aquarium that’s gradually turning into a slaughterhouse, with pools of light and big glassy lines that let you scan corners for movement. The score (Adrian Johnston) is synthy and throwback-y, the kind of electronic throb that says “we are doing Carpenter cosplay tonight,” and it mostly works because the movie is blunt enough to carry that vibe without collapsing into parody. Editing can get a little choppy in spots, and the script sometimes treats phones like cursed objects that only exist to fail at the worst possible moment, but the film keeps your attention by staying nasty and physical.

The movie gestures at grief and family fracture, mostly as a quick emotional primer for why the house feels haunted even before the chimp loses his shit. The real theme, though, is control, specifically the delusion that you can domesticate something wild because it loves you back. The horror expresses that as intimacy turning predatory: familiar spaces become hunting lanes, affectionate routines become attack cues, and “Ben understands us” becomes “Ben understands how to hurt us.” How much of what we call love is just the comfort of believing we’re safe.

This is Roberts landing in his sweet spot, a slick, throwback, single-location pressure cooker that feels like the January answer to “what if Cujo was a chimp and the house was a gorgeous vacation rental designed by Satan.” A fast, bloody, well-crafted chunk of killer-animal schlock that sacrifices depth for momentum, then earns back goodwill by making the chimp feel terrifyingly real and the carnage memorably fucked up.

Directed by Johannes Roberts.
Written by Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera.
Released January 9, 2026 by Paramount Pictures.