What does that? “Primer”

Shane Carruth’s film Primer generated a modest amount of buzz when it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film festival in 2004, but by-and-large vanished from the radar after that. Much of the excitement over the film was generated by the fact that writer/director/star Carruth made the movie for $7000 and shot on 16mm film. This looks past the fact that Primer is also a first-rate brain-teaser, easily one of the smartest movies made in the 21^st century, which still retains a solid emotional core. It’s a movie that bears—demands—repeated viewings in order to try and make sense of its story. I’m on viewing number four and I’m still glad I don’t have to try and explain the plot. Oh, wait…aw dammit!

Distilled to its simplest essence, Primer is about two guys that build a time machine in their garage and the wackiness that ensues. Abe and Aaron (David Sullivan and Carruth) are a couple of silicon-alley hopefuls, who, with a couple friends, put in 50-hour days at their tech jobs, then gather in Aaron’s garage trying to invent the next big thing. As the movie opens, they’ve already invented a diagnostic circuit board they sell mail-order, and are looking into a machine that affects the gravity around an object placed inside it. The first indication that they’ve stumbled onto something else entirely comes when they find that “the box” as they’ve come to call it is generating slightly more power than what they put into it. The full extent of what they’ve discovered comes a bit later, care of weeble and some mold. Time, they discover, moves differently inside the box. It moves faster, then doubles back on itself. Being the engineers that they are, Abe and Aaron immediately grasp the implications: they can travel backward through time in the box.

Carruth was an engineer before he turned his attention to filmmaking, and as such, the technical jargon and theory of the box sounds absolutely convincing. It helps that Abe and Aaron’s machine isn’t a sci-fi MacGuffin that can transport people back to the Stone Age, but instead is heavily limited: the user must spend as much time in the box as they want to go backward. So if you want to go back six hours you need to spend six hours in the box. They also need to time it so that they don’t emerge from the box at the same time as their earlier self enters. It’s confusing, yes, but some helpful geek posted this handy flowchart on Wikipedia.

From here, the film charts the breakdown in Abe and Aaron’s morals, values, and relationship as they begin to use the box to play the stock market, bet on basketball, and eventually manipulate a random act of violence at a party. It’s small-stakes stuff, but in such an intimate film, they seem massive. And here, Carruth once again shows his engineering roots. Rather than lazily fall back on the typical time-travel tropes—don’t step on a butterfly or it’ll wipe out civilization; don’t prevent your mom from meeting your dad, etc.—he poses a more disturbing question: if you can travel back in time, how do you know this is the first time you’ve lived this day? How do you know your actions, your conversation haven’t been scripted? By the end of the movie, when Aaron and Abe have learned how to extend the boxes’ range, we have to ask ourselves the same question about what’s happening on screen. Is Aaron really listening to March Madness on that earpiece he’s wearing, or is it his recollection of the conversation he’s having right now? As the film asks at one point, how many times had this moment been rehearsed?

Primer is intentionally and delightfully impenetrable. Carruth’s dialogue all rings true, and his characters don’t dumb down the physics for us (nor do they pull the old Star Trek trick of explaining the jargon with a trite simile: “We could utilize the cascade-decay of the tachyons. It’d be like riding on the back of a whale shark!”). There’s virtually no exposition aside from the occasional voiceover narration that takes the form of a phone call by some future Aaron to an unknown recipient. The movie won’t dumb itself down for you, and if you don’t follow it or don’t feel like putting in the effort, then screw you.

Beyond putting together a great braintwister of a plot, Carruth displays a boatload of raw filmmaking talent. He creates a distinctive look for his film in small, inexpensive strokes. The fluorescent lights, and stark, empty tech offices help emphasize Abe and Aaron’s alienation while keeping their secret. The American tech wasteland where the film takes place is evoked by perpetually showing the guys in dress shirts and ties like the cubicle-dwellers they are, and with shots of the suburban tract housing, the industrial parks. Setting a conversation between the two on the tailgate of Aaron’s pickup truck sipping out of massive Taco Bell cups tells us just about everything we need to know about these guys.

Carruth also has talent as a storyteller. An early scene shows a notepad being scooped up from beneath a weeble, foreshadowing the guys’ discovery of their box’s potential. The movie hints at a complicated web of emotions beneath Abe and Aaron’s casual friendship. Abe seems to be more concerned about Aaron’s wife and daughter than he is, while Aaron seems dead-set on impressing a cute single woman they know. Is he bored in his own marriage or is he trying to set Abe up? The movie hints at a sad, lonely lifestyle for Abe—just look at the way he serves himself a muffin—but Carruth never outright tells you anything. It’s not that kind of movie.

According to IMDB, Carruth hasn’t made anything else. That’s too bad. Maybe he only has one movie in him. I hope not, though. What most movies can’t accomplish with an eight-figure budget, Carruth managed on a shoestring, casting himself and having his parents cater.

And if anyone can explain what precisely happened at the end of the movie, feel free to explain it to me