Critics reviews

Years and multiple viewings later, the movie seems an inexhaustible resource—and, watched again today, even more miraculous than I remembered. It stands alone, an alien monolith in the landscape, unmoored to a cinematic school or movement, oblivious to fashion or trend.

While it seems to follow in the tradition of scrambled narrative popularized by Memento, it stakes out new territory in its examination of ordinary consciousness and goes further to examine the consciousness of the soul.

The last 30 minutes of Primer are nearly impossible to fully decipher on first viewing, and probably aren't much clearer several screenings later. This isn't a flaw. Carruth deliberately refuses to dot i's and cross t's, because at a certain point, the logistical ramifications of what his characters have done spin off into infinity, if not some sort of apocalypse.

The film is, technically speaking, science fiction, but of an unusually rigorous and unassuming kind.

A repeat-viewing brain twister to file along-side millennial puzzle films like Mulholland Drive and Memento, Shane Carruth's Primer unites physics and metaphysics in an ingenious guerrilla reinvention of cinematic science fiction: Its analog-egghead approach may be the freshest thing the genre has seen since 2001.