(Note: After a brief self-distributed theatrical run, Upstream Color is now available on streaming platforms including Netflix)
Upstream Color
Director: Shane Carruth
Writer: Shane Carruth
Producers: Shane Carruth, Casey Gooden, Ben LeClair
Stars: Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth, Andrew Sensenig, Thiago Martins
I am not sure of much, but Upstream Color most definitely includes love, and parasitic worms; which I believe the movie considers separate entities, though others may disagree.
I don’t know if telling you too much steals the experience from you, it’s really a movie whose context you select for yourself out of many sights and moments and words. Calling them “clues” is probably misleading. Early on we witness a kidnapping: a man (Thiago Martins) drugging a woman named Kris using a worm that puts her under his command. He robs Kris of everything while she compliantly sips water and transcribes a copy of Walden. She is lured somehow to a field, where another man (Andrew Sensenig) performs a strange surgery that transfers the growing worm into the body of a pig. He labels the pig and sets it loose in his great pen, where he feeds and watches over it among many others, and seems able to use them to check in on all the former human hosts for those worms.
Kris’s career and finances are obliterated by this experience, of which she remembers nothing. We catch up with her over a year later, meeting a man on a train named Jeff (Shane Carruth) who seems to be wandering the same mental wasteland of uprooted potential. They are drawn together and have a romance, one that seems to spook them both with its binding force. Are they in command of it at all? And what effect will it have on the colors of the newly-blossoming flowers?
Upstream Color thrives on the questions that are big as well as questions that seem small but conceal their essential connections to the bigger ones. It fearlessly treads into the abstract waters of Terrence Malick and others, but with an utterly different filmmaker leading the way. Shane Carruth, whose debut feature was the nearly-zero-budget time travel puzzle box Primer, might be described as a hyper-rational artist trying to codify something beneath reality. There is a serious method to his film, for which Carruth was also cinematographer, co-editor, casting director, and musical composer, and his method is to be as exactingly and expertly dedicated to recording what he has envisioned as he is determined not to explain what it is he is recording; even to himself.
I do not toss around the word “artist”; because Carruth, on only his second feature film, is a staggeringly talented film artist. Working with consumer-grade equipment he captures breathtaking images, creates rhythms of image and sound that take you into a reverie of the senses that defies the fearful state our screen lovers are in. The film creates a bewitching beauty that they live inside; and there’s a pathos activated by how worried and perplexed they often act within it.
Their love isn’t perfect – they squabble and fall into ruts and sometimes surrender to terrors that may be self-imposed or might be the product of ongoing meddling from a greater power. But they have this absolutely lovely loyalty to each other, and to their quest to understand. One of the most glorious scenes in the film involves a swimming pool and a bag of rocks, and creates the illusion of putting missing pieces in their place. Really it explains nothing, but, for Jeff, it somehow totally explains Kris, and that is what he wanted; and by that logic beneath logic the film so rigorously creates, it leads them down a magical path.
Maybe it’s saying that all of modern life is just a spell that hypnotizes you into generating money that someone else ends up with anyway. Maybe it’s about looking into the face of God, or maybe it’s about seeing ourselves the way God sees us. Maybe that’s not God over there at all; but simply an artist wandering among us, working in convoluted mediums that call upon the cycles of life and death and yoke our destinies with art’s inscrutable force.
You could call it science-fiction, romance, meditation, art film. I think Upstream Color is a mystery film, but an inverted one that doesn’t put prime importance on looking backwards to the question of “what happened to us?”, but lives in the thrumming uncertainty of “what do we do with the people we have become?” Indeed it inverts ordinary life itself, buzzing over the workaday concerns that life normally grows us towards and showing us people whose most urgent concerns have moved beyond bills and jobs and into more ethereal territory. Have they become as untethered from Earthly matters as the film shows? Is this good for them or bad?
This is one of the most unclassifiable films I’ve seen in a long time, and one of the best of 2013. It hit me first on a philosophical level, and the trailing questions that clog this review represent just some of the avenues it traveled in my brain. But as my distance from it increases, and my pondering continues, I find myself loving its world and characters more. I even love its love more, because anything that can make two people trust each other in so crazily-uncertain a world, especially after what Kris and Jeff have been through, is awesome stuff. It’s like I thought my way to feelings about it – and I think I’m paying a high compliment to Shane Carruth by saying that.