MovieChat Forums > Upstream Color (2013) Discussion > Just… what now?

Just… what now?

posted 25 days ago by Melton (5549)
2 replies | jump to latest

I love a film which doesn’t spoonfeed the audience and expects you to keep up, but this one just completely left me behind.

Primer was confusing as hell but at least it had a cool concept, characters you could hang on to, and dark implications that lingered in your imagination.

This was like the worst kind of Terence Malick film - it’s just an abstract breeze of images and moments for 90+ minutes and none of it connected with me.

It was more like an art installation. Sure, something like this could be a neat short film, but 90mins requires some kind of narrative, and characters you can invest in.

I suspect this fails because Shane Carruth, the mad genius who created the film and is the male lead, cast his girlfriend and made a film about a couple in love. He thinks she’s amazing and that what they have is really special and wants this ‘feeling’ to come across in the film… but it doesn’t. He’s basically an autist in love for the first time and it’s sent him mad.

Literally. The female lead, who shortly after became his wife, Amy Seimetz, has since filed restraining orders against Carruth, and he was later arrested for domestic assault and vandalism at the home of another ex.

The guy is off his tits. Shame because there’s a good idea at the heart of Upstream Colour and some neat low-fi sci-fi.

I hope Carruth gets it together and makes another film because inside that crazy head of his is some real talent…

[–] sONOMArEturns (1339) 25 days ago

I too recall seeing this and having zero idea of what to make of it. I think it's about, like, aliens who kidnap two people but they don't know it? I can't recall.

[–] Melton (5549) 25 days ago

Yes, a presumably alien parasite is injected into an unsuspecting woman by a Thief who can now control her mind and makes her empty her bank account for him.

After she eats something, the parasite becomes several large worms. She hears some loud noises emanating from a field in the country and is drawn to them. They are being played by a man called The Sampler who extracts the parasitic worms from her and transfers them to a pig in his pig farm. She now has a psychic connection to this pig.

(All the stuff above was bizarre and mildly interesting, but after this it turns into a real slog…)

Back in the city she is drawn to a man who has had a similar experience, played by Carruth, they get together. Their relationship is weird, they seem to have shared memories and are almost ‘reborn’, and they have an obsession with a book called ‘Walden’.

They experience various dramas based on their psychic connections to those pigs, who have since had piglets, and eventually are reunited with The Sampler, who has since killed the piglets and dumped their bodies in a stream. Their corpses releasing more of the parasites which then infect nearby orchids.

The orchids are harvested by the Thief who infects more people. Our happy couple kill the Sampler and band together with other victims, taking over the pig farm, and ending the cycle.

That’s basically what happens but it’s very hard to follow on first viewing because of how the film breezes along and makes dialogue unclear, much like a Nolan film. Everything’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it and just when you’re processing what you’ve just witnessed you’re bombarded with more weird stuff. It never slows down to digest events and there are no fully ‘human’ characters to hang on to.

The abstract presentation of bizarre events combines to give you a headache, which could be fine if there was an emotional core, but there isn’t.

It’s like Tenet but without the cool fight scenes to keep you entertained between the gobbledygook.