Upstream Color

2013 mystery

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A woman is kidnapped and hypnotized with the use of some sort of orchid worms. The thief had motives, ones that affect the poor woman's life. She later meets a man to whom she feels linked, and the two try to get to the bottom of what happened. 

I just described something that makes the movie sound like your typical Hollywood dramatic thriller, but this is anything but. This is more like cinematic poetry, another one of those movies that you feel more than you understand. Like Enemy, as well as a bunch of other movies that I'd even call favorites of mine, I understood just enough of this to like it although there are more than a few loose ends. This one's more difficult to connect with because it's much more abstract, and the characters seem to exist in some sort of dream landscape rather than the product of a damaged mind. Dialogue is scant, and the movie often progresses for several minutes without characters saying anything at all. Instead, you have to piece things together through imagery alone, and questions will abound. It also makes it difficult to connect to any of the characters although I came closest to liking the pig-farming musique concrete guy. During his scenes in the movie--mostly ones where he's just sitting around among pigs or wandering around collecting noises--the sounds become important, and those sounds work so well with the visuals. Thank director/writer Shane Carruth for that because he also composed the music for this film. If you don't recognize his name, he's also responsible for the better-known time-travel mind-bender Primer (another movie I didn't understand and have been meaning to rewatch), and like Primer, this is one that demands your attention. With Carruth, the argument's going to be that the guy purposely makes his movies difficult or complex or bewildering to hide the fact that he can't tell a good story or isn't a good director. However, I think the guy's a force to be reckoned with, and the way the story in this is spliced together and paced, it's hard to miss that there's a genius at work here. Seriously, this should have won some sort of editing award. They have those, right? This is a movie about cycles--orchids, worms, humans, pigs--and breaking cycles. I can't put my finger on any specifics, but I think the themes, though abstract, are still easy to connect with. And the abstractions move so poetically, so tantalizing, and so quietly, that you probably don't even need to connect with anything concretely anyway. It cuddles up with you subconscious and forces itself into your dreams.