Six Years. That is the duration that has passed since Shane Carruth‘s magnificent no-budget science fiction film Primer was launched on the festival circuit to thunderous applause. It was a Donnie Darko for the cooler kids. The engineer and mathie turned director has been quite silent ever since, although quiet rumblings have been around for about a year that he was cooking up something big and exciting and dense as a follow up. Now The Playlist has gotten a hold of this script, A Topiary, and are scratching their heads in an attempt to summarize the film. Do I want to know more? Hell yea, but really, if Primer is any indication of what Carruth is just getting started with then I want to go into the follow-up film as cold as possible, but resisting is difficult and below is enough plot outline to get you started:

“The main story, at first ambiguous in its relation to the prologue, revolves around ten boys aged seven to eleven living in a small rural town. The boys are in possession of a mysterious black box which in turn creates mysterious white discs. The group of kids are at once puzzled and fascinated by the nature of the box, and eventually manipulate the discs into other peculiarly named artifacts (petals, arcs, fronds, etc.). Their creations and constructions lead up to their manufacturing of seemingly sentient quasi-mechanical beings. Almost as if ‘Topiary’ were an abstract arthouse take on Pokémon, you can imagine the competition and troubles the beings create amongst the children.”

Intrigued yet?