10 Great Indie Films From The Past 5 Years You May Have Missed

10. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

Before directing and co-writing Jurassic World and signing on to other Hollywood Goliaths like the upcoming Jurassic World sequel and Star Wars Episode IX, Colin Trevorrow directed this low-budget offbeat indie comedy romance.

New Girl’s Jake Johnson is a writer at Seattle Magazine who finds an ad in the classifieds from someone claiming to be in search of a companion to travel back in time. Parks and Recreation’s Aubrey Plaza is Darius, one of the interns who agrees to help him investigate, and ends up going undercover as the mysterious loner’s potential time travelling sidekick.

Executive producer, Mark Duplass, plays the reclusive eccentric Kenneth, who is convinced he knows the secret to travelling back in time and fixing a terrible event that changed his life forever. At first Darius is understandably sceptical, but at she spends more and more time with the enigmatic Kenneth, she starts to wonder if his sanity is as questionable as it first seems, and whether, ultimately, it really even matters.

Although the question of whether Kenneth is really a time traveller or just some nut-job is central to the film’s plot, the growing relationship between him and Darius is the real driving force of the film. Darius, formerly disillusioned and apathetic, gradually becomes fascinated by this focussed and driven, but ultimately damaged outcast, and experiences a new-found enthusiasm she’d previously been missing. Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass both shine in this film individually, but it’s their onscreen chemistry that really cements this as a loveably goofy and heart-warming story of two lost souls haunted by the events of their pasts.