Character Relationship Map: Primer

Characters

• Aaron (played by Shane Carruth) — protagonist

  Co-engineer who discovers time travel with Abe. Impulsive and meddlesome, he profits from same-day stock trades using foreknowledge. He experiences physical side effects like earbleeds and deteriorati...

• Abe (played by David Sullivan) — protagonist

  Co-engineer and cautious counterpart to Aaron. He refines the time travel proof-of-concept into a stable human-sized apparatus and tests it on himself. He suffers severe physical tolls, including 36-h...

• Thomas Granger (played by Chip Carruth) — supporting

Story Dynamics

Alliances, conflicts, and narrative interactions that evolve throughout the story.

• Abe → Thomas Granger (Narrative Investigator) — Abe uses Thomas's condition to reassess the safety of their experiment.

  Abe analyzes Thomas's condition and concludes that time travel may have caused his temporal overlap and coma.

• Aaron → Abe (Alliance Teammate) — They are scientific partners whose collaboration creates and develops the time apparatus.

  Aaron and Abe jointly investigate electromagnetic weight reduction and discover the temporal anomaly while working on entrepreneurial projects.

• Aaron → Thomas Granger (Conflict Pursuer) — Aaron's pursuit places Thomas inside the film's most alarming temporal incident.

  After a late-night encounter, Thomas Granger is pursued by Aaron and later falls into a comatose state.

Story Analysis

Two engineers discover time travel, exploit it, and become trapped in a conflict among competing versions of themselves.

Plot Progression

1. The Accidental Causal Loop — Aaron and Abe discover that their weight-reduction experiment creates a temporal anomaly. Abe develops the discovery into a human-sized box and proves that a person can travel six hours backward.
2. Profit Beneath The Strain — The partners repeat the experiment to exploit stock-market foreknowledge. Extended days, earbleeds, deteriorating handwriting, and growing personality differences begin to undermine their trust.
3. Granger's Broken Timeline — Thomas Granger appears temporally damaged after a mysterious late-night encounter. Abe concludes that the experiment is dangerously unpredictable and reveals a secret failsafe box.
4. War Among The Versions — Abe travels four days into the past to stop the experiment, but Aaron's future self has already prepared a competing intervention. Their overlapping plans expose the extent of temporal duplication and...
5. Heroism And Separation — The men tentatively cooperate to alter the party shooting, allowing Aaron to stop the gunman. They then split over how far temporal manipulation should go, with Aaron planning expansion and Abe planni...