Dir. Johannes Roberts, US, 2026, 89 mins
Cast: Johnny Sequoyah, Jess Alexander, Victoria Wyant, Miguel Torres Umba, Troy Kotsur, Benjamin Cheng
Review by Colin Dibben
Lucy (Sequoyah) is back home for hols in Hawaii with chums, intent on chilling and partying and hanging with family, nephew Nick (Cheng), dad Adam (Kotsur) and chimpanzee Ben (Umba, plus motion capture CGI).
Yes, Ben is one of the family. Unfortunately, Ben has been bitten by a rabid mongoose and his playful, curious and affectionate nature is changing into something much less pleasant.
Remember before horror films got all portentous and ‘meaningful’? When horror films were ‘killrides’, tense establishing sequences setting up a series of set-piece slays? Well, that is pretty much what you get here and it feels great. Really refreshing!
No tedious back stories – the emotional impact of a recently deceased mother is stopped short with a succinct “yeah, the end was tough” and several plot elements act as McGuffins, such as the profoundly deaf dad, the rabies facts and figures at the beginning. There is just the right amount of sexual tension between the characters to give drama, then the premise and the locations take over.
We have two locations that are nicely imagined – the detail of the villa interiors especially, in hazy, milky nighttime blues, like an update on I Walked with a Zombie, but also the panicked, handheld swimmer perspective shots in the pool – by cinematographer Stephen Murphy and production designer Simon Bowles.
The horribly dreamy feeling created by some of the images, such as Ben’s face slowly manifesting behind gauzy curtains or behind patterned glass, the eerie red and blue filters, contrasts nicely with the frenetic action as the young women jump in and out of the pool, around a smashed-up verandah and into the, for the purposes of the narrative, two-storey villa.
Fair play also to co-writer and director Roberts, for sticking to keeping the dialogue simple and letting the threat posed by Ben play out in violent fashion. Lucy and her mates discover the ‘problem’ and set about trying to survive in almost real time – that is all and that is enough.
There are two gory set pieces, one within the first few minutes, but most of the gore is generic or suggested or glimpsed only very briefly, rather than shown at injury detail level during an act of violence. Having said that, what happens to Brad’s jaw stays with you a while.
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