Primer
Shane Carruth, David Sullivan, Casey Gooden
Director: Shane Carruth
'Rewards repeated listening' is a phrase seen in pretty much every third album review. For this micro-budget indie science-fiction film - with the accent on 'science' - we need to tickle the cliche: 'requires repeated viewing'.
Shane Carruth's Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner has been bending brains since its release, becoming a cult classic in a small but worthy genre: 'mind-bending movies'. Mainstream rivals - think Memento, Inception - seem simple in comparison.
Engineers Abe (David Sullivan) and Aaron (Carruth) supplement their income by selling homemade error-checking devices, while trying to come up with the big invention that will secure venture capital. This leads to the creation of a machine that allows users to travel short distances back in time. 'We can publish!' is their first reaction, quickly giving way to 'we can make a killing on the stock market'.
Close attention is required from the start: writer-director-actor-everything else Carruth refuses to dumb down the tech jargon and characters talk rapidly over each other; when the causality-bending, multiple-timeline-creating, paradox-invoking fun begins, things get really confusing.
We won't go into it in detail ... uh ... spoilers. No, we could definitely explain it if we wanted to ... oh, okay. 'Frankly, anybody who claims he fully understands what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar,' Esquire's reviewer wrote in 2004. Having seen it more than once, we remain honest non-savants.