Belonging to the same time-travelling mindfuck genus as Donnie Darko and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Shane Carruth’s splendid $7000 dollar debut rightly took the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, beating the faux-indie Garden State to the punch. That’s almost enough to restore your faith in Mr. Redford’s flea-circus following the endurance test that was Me And You And Everyone We Know. Almost.
While Primer certainly draws on any number of independent cinema’s lineages – the relentlessly male milieu of In The Company Of Men, the hip metaphysical mores of Pi or the sterilised chill of THX 1138 ­– Mr. Carruth’s cerebral sci-fi thriller is very much it’s own thing. The director himself stars as Aaron, one of a gang of hungry young software designers and inventors who grovel to technically minded patrons for investment in garage-land prototypes.
When he and colleague Abe (Sullivan) unintentionally invent a containable loop that allows them to skip back several hours in time, things inevitably go kind of cuckoo. (“I haven’t eaten since later today,” declares Aaron at one point.) Paradoxically – and I guess that’s only appropriate - the more extensively they use the device, the more entropic their existences become. It’s kind of hard to have a life when you’re avoiding your other selves and realities.
This endlessly enigmatic trip is bolstered by Carruth’s increasingly vertiginous use of suspense and a seemingly boundless capacity for philosophical playfulness.
Like the interior of the suitcase in Kiss Me Deadly or a Maxwell’s Demon, we’re never too sure how these apparently lo-fi temporal jaunts actually work, but it’s a worthwhile leap of faith to make.