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Cambridge-born director Joahnnes Roberts trades underwater thrills and spills with voracious sharks in 47 Meters Down and its sequel for an uncomfortably close encounter with humans’ closest living relative.
Set in a remote part of sun-kissed Hawaii, this gore-slathered horror invites the full monty of primate puns: Family pet goes ape. Chimpanzee goes bananas. Rabid companion goes nuts.
College student Lucy Pinborough (Johnny Sequoyah) flies home to paradise with best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) but the reverie is short-lived when Lucy discovers Kate has invited rival Hannah (Jessica Alexander) to join them at the Pinboroughs’ swanky cliffside house.
Tension heightens when Kate’s brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng), who has been Lucy’s secret crush for years, shows more interest in Hannah.
Lucy’s father Adam (Troy Kotsur) is a celebrated deaf author, who is going to be away for a book tour, leaving Lucy in charge of her younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and the household’s other resident: Ben (Miguel Torres Umba).
The highly intelligent chimpanzee was taught to communicate by Adam’s late wife, a linguistic professor who believed that apes can be educated to verbalise emotions using a soundboard. Ben is considered a part of the family but lives in an outdoor enclosure.
Shortly before Lucy’s arrival, a mongoose carrying rabies access the enclosure and bites Ben.
By the time Adam leaves to honour literary commitments, the animal is crazed and when local veterinarian Dr Doug Lambert (Rob Delaney) enters Ben’s enclosure to give the chimpanzee an injection, all hell breaks loose.
Primate is a slickly orchestrated battle of man versus nature that doesn’t skimp on the stomach-churning practical effects and prosthetics including, most prominently, a chief antagonist realised using Umba’s physical performance and sophisticated creature heads with eyebrow and nostril movements controlled by puppeteers.
The grim and grisly tone is established in a doom-saturated opening sequence that elicits the first audible gasp of disgust.
Audience interaction gets increasingly louder as Roberts and co-writer Ernest Riera invite Ben to bludgeon, pound and dismember any human interloper to his cliffside hunting ground.
The monkey business is wince-inducingly graphic and entirely gratuitous, fully justifying content warnings about strong and gory violence.
The film could have been just as nerve-racking without us having to watch characters surrender parts of their face to Ben’s frenzied paws.
Sequoyah is a sympathetic and likable heroine and a solid supporting performance from Oscar winner Kotsur allows Roberts to conduct one harrowing sequence in chilling silence from the perspective of someone who cannot hear bloodcurdling screams and carnage unfolding around them.
He hears no evil but we definitely see it, in nauseating, icky close-up
RATING: 6.5/10
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