Shane Carruth makes specialised talk sound like ordinary working conversation, without announcing when we should be alarmed. His matter-of-fact acting in Primer is worth the effort, though the tangled storytelling can demand more patience than it rewards.
Fi1m perspective
In Primer (2004), Shane Carruth speaks the scientific language as though nobody would need it explained. His Aaron and David Sullivan's Abe sound like men accustomed to these conversations, with no need to underline the important words. We felt uneasy listening to them because their calm competence made time travel seem horribly practical. Carruth makes an engineer's concentration convincing, and he does not need grand displays of astonishment to persuade us that the discovery matters.
He wrote and directed Primer, then returned as writer, director and actor in his second feature, Upstream Colour (2013). There he plays Jeff, in a science-fiction story concerned with identity and connection. His other acting credits include the coroner in Swiss Army Man (2016) and Daniel Forrester, the lead in the psychological thriller The Dead Centre (2018). These parts sit alongside an unusually close involvement in making his own films, where the performance is one of several jobs he takes on.
In Primer, Troy Dick's rough-looking cinematography helps that performance by declining to make the engineers look grand. Carruth's own production design makes their invention look like a practical problem somebody has solved, so Aaron belongs in the space around him. He also edits and composes, and the cutting provides much of the anxiety that he keeps out of his voice. The music is less memorable; the technical exchanges give us enough to attend to.
The difficulty comes when the scrambled storytelling makes it hard to keep track of the people as well as the machine. Carruth and Sullivan make the language convincing, but that cannot make every conversation's place in the story clear. The coroner role in Swiss Army Man is a smaller reason to seek him out: that film is carried by Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe. For his acting, begin with Primer, provided working out a film is your idea of an evening well spent.
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.
