


Let’s just say Primal Fear is a lot.īut as Roger Ebert once said, “It’s not what a film is about, it’s how it is about it.” And I’ll be damned if Primal Fear isn’t all about it. All of that comes before a wild plot twist at the end that had jaws hanging to the floor back in 1996. The premise is full of any number of genre tropes: the oily lawyer who will defend the lowest of the low, a sensational and gruesome murder, a defendant with dissociative disorder (called multiple personality disorder at the time of the film’s release), a sex scandal involving the Catholic Church, and even a formerly married prosecutor and defense attorney facing off against each other. But boy, does Primal Fear lay it on thick, especially if you look at it on paper.

I don’t mean that as a pejorative-I love pulp. There’s no way around it, Primal Fear is pulp.
