At his most persuasive, Shane Carruth makes science fiction sound like ordinary workplace conversation. We admire his trust in an audience’s curiosity, but the tangled storytelling can demand more effort than it rewards.
Fi1m perspective
In Primer (2004), Carruth’s Aaron and David Sullivan’s Abe discuss an impossible invention as though it were another problem at work. Neither actor flags the important technical terms for us, which makes their conversations more convincing and harder to follow. We felt uneasy because the two men made time travel sound like something competent people could put to use. Carruth is good at playing someone whose intelligence gives us no reason to trust his judgement. His debut is a good science-fiction thriller for those who enjoy working things out, although it cannot always reward the effort.
Troy Dick’s rough-looking cinematography suits these engineers and their matter-of-fact discussions. Carruth’s production design likewise treats the time machine as a practical object rather than an occasion for wonder. As writer and director, he lets the discussion carry the discovery, and the plain surroundings make that decision convincing. Some of the roughness wears on us, but a slicker presentation would make these men harder to believe.
Carruth also edits and composes the music, though the cutting does more to unsettle us than the score. Conversations arrive in an order that makes us keep reconsidering how they fit together. The frustration comes when another round of concentration still leaves the connections unclear. The music supports the unease without doing much that stays with us. At 77 minutes, Primer moves quickly enough to keep uncertainty from becoming exhausting, but it leaves little time to settle on an answer.
His second feature, Upstream Colour (2013), takes that interest in fragmented storytelling towards identity and natural cycles. Image, sound and editing take on more of the work, while conventional plotting and clearly audible dialogue become less dependable guides. It is a shift away from Primer’s technical conversations, though the demand for an audience willing to tolerate uncertainty remains. Start with Primer if scientific talk holds your interest, and leave time afterwards to argue about what happened.
Biography
Shane Carruth is an American filmmaker. He wrote, directed, produced, edited, composed the music for and performed one of the lead roles in his debut feature Primer (2004); he also served as production designer. The film won the Grand Jury Prize and the Alfred P. Sloan Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
Carruth was born in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in 1972. Before filmmaking he studied mathematics at Stephen F. Austin State University and worked as a software engineer developing flight-simulation software. His second feature, Upstream Color (2013), for which he again handled multiple key roles including director, writer and composer, premiered at Sundance.
