Spring forward, fall back
Ominous Primer goes back to the future
The shoestring budget sci-fi film Primer discovers moonlighting entrepreneurs Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) as they sit around a kitchen table heatedly discussing their start-up computer hardware business with two junior partners. Their tensions and disappointments electrify the atmosphere.
With their loosened neckties and 5 o’clock shadows, Aaron and Abe look like the kind of thirtyish, office-park engineers you can find anywhere in the country. They certainly don’t seem like two guys with the power to alter life as we know it.
Primer explores how two would-be businessmen stumble across an invention with unthinkable consequences for their futures — and possibly the very concept of “the future” itself. Carruth wrote, directed and oversaw virtually every aspect of the production, and he applied a fierce intelligence to Primer. For most of the film he stays just far enough ahead of the audience to keep us intrigued, even as we struggle to make sense of Primer’s final act.
We don’t really know what Abe and Aaron build in the carport, only that it’s some kind of power field contained in a metal box. But their excitement tugs us along with them. Primer’s first third feels like being a fly on the wall of creation, like witnessing the early garage days of Apple Computers. (Carruth made Primer for a reported $7,000, and no doubt sympathizes with his struggling, cash-strapped characters.)
Tests with common objects — first the round chits of paper from a three-hole punch, then a Weeble toy — gradually reveal that inside “the box,” time flows backward. As the pair contemplates their invention’s potential, the actors subtly distinguish between Abe as more sensitive and conscientious than the calculating, self-interested Aaron.
Increasingly paranoid that others will learn about their discovery, the pair move bigger versions of the box into a bland, rental storage shed, where they experiment on themselves. Taking precautions against tampering with the timeline, they find they can live the same day twice and cash in on stock fluctuations and sports scores. Occasionally Carruth breaks Primer’s eerily fraught atmosphere with a few jokes: “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon.”
At times the partners openly discuss the implications of the box. What would you do given unlimited money and freedom? But just as often, Primer talks around its moral ambiguities and leaves ideas implied but unspoken. The phrase “time travel” never even gets uttered aloud, so Primer feels like an ominous Harold Pinter play that substitutes technical jargon for pregnant pauses.
Eventually Aaron and Abe are shocked to learn that an outsider has used the box for reasons unknown. Soon enough, other versions of themselves, from further in the future, enter the picture to alter events that the audience has already seen. Aaron and Abe try to take control of their predicament, but the genie won’t go back in the bottle.
Carruth intends to capture the sense of dislocation you can find in Philip K. Dick novels that rewrite the rules of the universe. But rather than share the perspective of uncomprehending characters, we’re denied details about what Abe and Aaron know and why they make increasingly baffling decisions. When the duo try to both prevent and engineer a dangerous event at a birthday party, the audience desperately wishes Primer came with a set of FAQs.
Nevertheless, Primer, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, establishes Carruth as an impressive, serious-minded filmmaker who cultivates a palpable sense of dread and addresses complex concepts without watering them down.