The film's experimental plot and dense dialogue were controversially received. "Esquire"'s Mike D'Angelo claimed that "anybody who claims he fully understands what's going on in "Primer" after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar". Scott Tobias writes for "The A.V. Club": "The banter is heavy on technical jargon and almost perversely short on exposition; were it not for the presence of voiceover narration, the film would be close to incomprehensible." For the "Los Angeles Times", Carina Chocano writes: "sticklers for linear storytelling are bound to be frustrated by narrative threads that start promisingly, then just sort of fall off the spool". Some reviewers were entirely put off by the film's obfuscated narrative. Kirk Honeycutt of "The Hollywood Reporter" complained that "Primer" "nearly gets lost in a miasma of technical jargon and scientific conjecture".