10 Movies That Were Designed To Mess With Your Head
3. Primer
Movies about time travel tend to walk two distinct paths. They’re either light-hearted romps through bygone or future time periods, a la Back to the Future, or they’re dark and gritty attempts to teach us lessons about the consequences of our actions. Primer is somehow neither, and chooses to the blaze its own confusing trail, one so hard to follow you need a diagram to really piece the whole thing together.
Primer follows two engineers – Aaron and Abe – who accidentally discover time travel while working on extra-curricular projects in Aaron’s garage. Rather than going on wacky Bill and Ted-esque adventures, they wind up wreaking temporal havoc through performing even the simplest of tasks.
It’s a movie about the science behind time travel, one that’s more interested exploring the concept from a realist perspective. Nothing is dumbed down for the sake of entertainment purposes, so Primer is a slightly drab, dour movie about the dangers (and benefits) of time-loops and time travel body doubles.
In motion, Primer is infinitely more baffling than it even sounds on paper, and refuses to ever hold the viewer’s hand or guide them through the plot. In fact, repeat viewings and a paper pad at hand are arguably the only ways to walk out of Primer fully satisfied.