The Primer director's long-awaited second feature, about parasites that absorb identity, is freaky and strange – and attempts a colossal synch-up between the digital and cosmic worlds

Shane Carruth thoroughly earned his cult status in independent American cinema almost 10 years ago with a brilliant debut, a time-travel movie called Primer that included the immortal line: "Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon."

Primer was complex, cerebral and absorbing; comparisons were made by me and others to Darren Aronofsky's Pi and Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, but really it looked and felt like nothing else. Carruth's reputation grew year by year as it became clear that he had no immediate follow-up (one project was reportedly abandoned) and so our excitement at the arrival of this second film was extreme: it was rumoured to be an epic scientific excursion into altered states, a rhapsody of ideas, a visual...