10 Heart-Breaking Film Moments When The Hero Became The Villain

4. Aaron - Primer

A somewhat more cerebral choice than the selection of intense thrillers and dark, violent drama that populates this list, Primer's true villain is definitely harder to parse out than most, largely because of the film's labyrinthine narrative and confounding ethics. Basically, Aaron and Abe are two corporate engineers who try to invent things on the side and accidentally discover a way to travel back in time while developing a box that makes items weigh less. Needless to say, once they've figured out some of the quirks and kinks of the device they decide to make a bigger version in order to play the stock markets and become rich; a victimless crime, one would think, but things soon start getting much more complicated when the implications of their activities start to make themselves known... Those implications arise in the form of Abe and Aaron's doubles, who alternately approach and antagonise their true selves and are themselves manipulated to the point where it's really very hard to distinguish who's responsible for what by the end - except when Aaron reveals that he's been in control of the situation since more or less the very beginning, having recorded his own conversations then travelled back to the beginning of the timeline to let his past self live as though things are normal. All the while, Abe has been secretly played, and the real tragedy at the heart of the movie is not that Abe's ideas have been stolen or that their great discovery may now make its way into the hands of other people, but that Abe and Aaron's friendship has been irreparably torn apart by the latter.