On leaving Primer I was reminded that time-travel simply isn’t worth the trouble. And there’s a lot to be had whenever you mess with the continuum, as two shoe-string inventors find out one evening in their garage. They’re working on discovering the next big thing which in this case turns out to be a box that holds time static, or turns it backwards, or moves the world forwards, or something like that. Primer is deliberately vague about the facts, or rather the fiction, of its science. Like the inventors, this is shoe-string filmmaking that makes a big deal of it’s small budget. There is nary a shot that looks cheaper than it should, or over-reaching when it shouldn’t. The film’s grainy aesthetic presents an other worldly experience and rather like the Blair Witch Project, it achieves an awful lot with very little ($7,000 to be precise).

Writer, director, producer and co-star Shane Carruth knows what he wants to do and does it with great style. There also is his undoing. For much of the perplexity that makes Primer worth a second look, if only to untangle the story, is lost in stylised constraint. The story arc is flattened by his tech-heads who talk tech-talk, squandering plot for pseudo-science even during the film’s big moments. Their chatty ways make a hard-to-follow story even more baffling than it already is.
Yet I do want to see Primer again although it’s less for arts sake than curiosity: to Carruth’s credit, he generates a maddening need to understand.
// COLIN FRASER