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"What's worse, thinking you're being paranoid or knowing you should be?

i can’t stand the likes of Tenet, and Inception walks a very fine line for me — but Primer is something else.

made on a shoestring budget and acted by director Shane Carruth’s friends and family, Carruth wrote and produced a mind-bending time-travel film grounded firmly in reality. the props are made of everyday items, there are no special effects, and the dialogue is fast-paced and believable — the characters talk to each other, not to the audience.

while immersive and compelling, these realistic conversations come at a cost: there’s a resounding lack of exposition, and you will get lost.

i can accept this, though — because thanks to Carruth’s meticulous writing, it is possible to understand. this is where Tenet lost me. walking out of the theatre, i felt the narrative had been engineered to be confusing, as if to showcase the director’s own intelligence.

in contrast, Primer doesn’t hold your hand, but it never feels smug. the story rewards your attention. and once the premise clicks, it spirals fast.

the two protagonists begin exploiting their new invention by doing what we’ve all imagined, trading stocks. but as the story unfolds we see tension build between Aaron and Abe, stemming from their different thresholds for risk.

Abe is more tentative and calculated, while Aaron is willing to take chances interfering with the past, and as a result, the future. their time travelling troubles begin when they find themselves being followed by an acquaintance who has used the box to stop our duo from making presumably catastrophic changes to the timeline.

what changes are those? the protagonists don’t know, and neither do we.

"I guess I could shave a couple minutes off my day by eating on the toilet.

while the timeline narrative is at the forefront, it’s the evolution of the relationship between Aaron and Abe that is the most compelling aspect of the film. how quickly they come to distrust each other as they both scramble backwards through time in order to reverse their mistakes. the more the characters loop back in time, the more uncertain the viewer becomes of which version of them we are watching. this is mirrored by the breakdown of our characters’ relationship on screen.

all in all i really enjoyed watching this movie; and while the director turned out to be a bit of a weirdo, i would recommend checking it out.