by SARAH ROWLAND

If you leave the theatre after watching Primer for the first time uttering the words, "Um, I don't get it," you're not alone. In fact, anyone claiming they get it after only one viewing is either a professor of quantum physics, a bold-faced liar or a visitor from the hereafter. And don't bother trying to figure out the science behind the fiction; this time travel freakout will put you in a rabbit hole with no way out.

Comparable to Memento and Pi in its brain twisting ambition, the $7,000 (U.S.) production follows the story of two engineering geeks who hold down corporate jobs by day and obsessively work on their garage-based physics lab by night. When they stumble upon technology that can alter time and effectively produce doubles, the movie starts to feel like the narrative equivalent of an Escher engraving. With lines like "I'm hungry. I haven't eaten since later this afternoon," it's never really clear if a character is a carbon of the future or an imprint of the present.

Mathematical engineer turned self-taught filmmaker Shane Carruth is used to this reaction. Long before production started, he suspected his film might be too convoluted for some people, so he ran his script by his brother to see if the storyline was too opaque. The answer was an unambiguous, "Yes." Yet, Carruth decided to ignore the results from his impromptu vox populi and execute Primer as is.

"It was always more important to me that what the characters were saying was real than whether the audience knows about dynomagnetism or cares about superconductors," he says from his Dallas home. "Those scenes are written with information about the story, like who's proprietary, who's protective and who's enthusiastic about what, so you don't need to know every single aspect of what they're doing because it's really a backdrop."

It all adds up

Along with the writing, acting, producing, editing and directing were all firsts for Carruth, who at the age of 28 decided that filmmaking (and not mathematical engineering) was his bliss.

"I am an incredibly late bloomer," he says. "I feel like I'm behind most people because it took me so long to figure out what I wanted to do and when I did, I wasn't brave enough to put my efforts toward it. It finally took ageing to scare me enough to act on my passion."

Yep, staring down the barrel of a 30th b-day is good that way. Lucky for him, though, his numerical know-how wasn't a complete waste of an education. He approached the trial-and-error three-year project like one of his counter-intuitive mathematical problems.

"I was really naïve when I started making this film so I didn't know how much work it was going to be," says the soft-spoken Texan. "So I thought, ‘If I can just tear it apart and figure out its component pieces, then I think I can probably get through this.'"

He did, and with a budget that only afforded him a two-to-one shooting ratio to boot. The result is an eerie and jaundiced looking sci-fi jewel. And like the best fantasy cinema, it may dive into wormholes but the real exploration is into man's soul. To that end, Primer allows its two protagonists (Carruth and David Sullivan) to meddle with destiny as they snooker the stock market and relive dangerous situations for the sole purpose of playing knights in shining armour.

Hollywood one, Jesus zero

As for Carruth, his post-Primer financial situation hasn't changed one iota, despite receiving international acclaim and the 2004 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The effect has been a new-found shift in his priorities: "I only recently realized that if I had a machine like the one in the movie, yeah, I would still love to tell the world about it and I would love to do some totally altruistic things. But the very first thing I would do is find a way to get money and just get that worry out of the way. Then I'd go and be the hero of all mankind."

This ungodly revelation seems to fly in the face of his Christian faith, which he says did not play into his storyline, not on any conscious level anyway.

"I was raised in the church and I have regular meditative quiet time where I read the scripture and pray," he says, later admitting, "I thought I was a good person but I'm starting to wonder: maybe I'm just greedy."

Primer opens at Cinéma du Parc Friday, Nov. 26

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