Jun 17

Jun 17 Classic Movie Review : Primer (2004)

Time-travel has been written about for well over a century. To my knowledge, H.G Wells was the first to write about an actual time-travel machine in 1895, but I’m sure the concept of fixing the past from the present was explored in fiction way before that. You’ve probably had at least one beer-soaked conversation with a guy who thinks he invented the idea of “going back in time to kill Hitler.” You didn’t. Neither did he. That fantasy’s got mileage.

But here’s the thing: time travel wouldn’t work like that. And if it ever did, your first experience wouldn’t look like a Marvel climax or a Spielberg montage. It would look like Shane Carruth’s cult film Primer.

Primer is a basement-budget sci-fi film about two engineers: the hilariously named Abe (UFC fighter T.J Dillashaw lookalike David Sullivan) and Aaron (writer-director-everything Shane Carruth), who accidentally invent time travel in a suburban garage. They’re the kind of guys who wear white shirts and ties while working from home, which tells you everything you need to know about their vibe. They're allergic to having a good time and don’t mean to discover the future. They just want to build a machine that does… something, and oops: it ends up being a box that lets you loop back six hours in time.

It works like this: you sit in the box for six hours, and when you step out, it’s six hours earlier. Now there are two of you: the version that just stepped out, and the one who still hasn’t entered yet. Every trip creates a duplicate, every duplicate creates uncertainty, and eventually you lose track of who started what, or when, or why.

And that’s the point.

You’re not supposed to understand anything, because neither do they

Primer isn’t a puzzle you’re meant to solve. It’s a documentary about men who mistake certainty for control and slowly dissolve into multiplicity. The film gives you just enough grounding to feel like you’re following along, then pulls the rug out from under your understanding. Not out of malice, but out of genuine conceptual fidelity. If time travel really existed, the first thing it would break is your sense of self. Not just which version of you is real, but whether realness is even a thing anymore.

At first, Abe and Aaron use their discovery to make petty gains: stock tips, lottery bets, the kind of harmless time-theft any nerd would fantasize about. But it doesn’t stay harmless. Once one of them starts using the box without telling the other, trust dies. You can’t have mutual consent when there are three versions of you in play and two of them are lying. Soon they’re altering timelines, sabotaging each other, and confronting versions of themselves they didn’t authorize into existence.

At some point, and it’s hard to say when, exactly, Aaron becomes a domineering asshole. Not in a character-arc way, but in the way people change when their moral framework gets quietly rewritten by power. He’s no longer “Aaron who discovered time travel.” He’s Aaron plus every decision he never confessed to. Aaron squared. Aaron refracted through four or five overlapping timelines.

That’s the horror of Primer: not the science, but the silence. The total breakdown of knowable causality. The movie doesn’t yell “look at this plot twist!” It whispers, “you no longer have a reliable sense of cause and effect.” And you feel that.

Watching Primer is a weird and almost hostile experience. It fails every conventional storytelling test: characters don’t arc, dialogue is mumbled, exposition is nonexistent, and the climax feels like a PowerPoint slide for paranoid engineers. And yet it works. Not in a narrative sense, but in a psychological one. You don’t enjoy it while you watch it, you enjoy it later, as your brain refuses to let it go. It sticks because it feels like a message smuggled in from a universe where physics broke first and morality followed.

So no, I can't tell you exactly how Primer works. I don’t think Shane Carruth can either. But I’m pretty sure this is the most honest depiction of time travel we’ll ever get. Not exciting. Not enlightening. Just deeply unnerving.