Upstream Color, by the guy who brought you Primer

April 28, 2013 5:58 PM

"Having the movie wash over me was one of the most transcendent experiences of my moviegoing life." The movie is out in theaters, and available for digital download soon. Some reviews and also some interviews.

In an audio interview: "The only James Bond movie I would ever want to see is the one where he loses a hand."

Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Wikipedia.

Previously on mefi.

posted by legospaceman (76 comments total)

Re: spoilers, from the filmschoolrejects review:

"Contrary to some reports Upstream Color does in fact have a plot. It’s not the focus of the film, and Carruth himself has said the movie is impossible to spoil..." - yet you may find it more stimulating to not have been exposed to the mechanistic aspects of the narrative.
posted by legospaceman at 6:03 PM on April 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

I seem to have missed my window to see it in Boston in the late unpleasantness, but I am looking forward to buying the download. Primer is a homebrew masterpiece, a movie that certainly shows the limitations under which it was created, but transcends them, and I'm dying to see what he does next.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:35 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

I was anticipating this and it seems I've already missed it.
posted by escabeche at 6:37 PM on April 28, 2013

I am going to enjoy the living unholiness out of this. like going to the movies in my pyjamas with a sackful of snacks and a bucket of soda and with a pee jar
posted by Foci for Analysis at 6:42 PM on April 28, 2013

This is perhaps my favorite kind of movie. The kind where other people tie themselves in knots trying to figure out WHAT IS IT ABOUT when it's about just letting it into your eyes.
posted by louche mustachio at 6:48 PM on April 28, 2013 [4 favorites]

Saw it at the Brattle in Cambridge with the director in attendance. There was one tiny element of the plot that I hadn't noticed that makes more or less the whole experience make some kinda sense, which Carruth mentioned in the Q&A. Now I really want to see it again, because I already know how much more sense it will make with that understanding.

Understanding is not crucial to enjoyment, but the person who understands and the person who just feasts on it are having rather different experiences.
posted by Peevish at 6:57 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Everything I read about this makes it sounds like the Entertainment from Infinite Jest.

I would love to see this in cinemas, but I'm not holding out hope for it reaching my neck of the woods, except on the arts theatre circuit in a few years. I'll have to content myself with direct download.
posted by figurant at 7:09 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

The kind where other people tie themselves in knots trying to figure out WHAT IS IT ABOUT when it's about just letting it into your eyes.

I'm in sympathy with that. But on the other hand, that was exactly how I experienced MULLHOLLAND DRIVE, and then right after the movie my friends who I watched it with spent two hours tying themselves into knots trying to figure out what it was about, and after that, I liked it a hundred times more than I'd liked it right after the movie ended, which was already a hell of a lot.
posted by escabeche at 7:12 PM on April 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

I'm amazed that I managed to see this in the theater. It only played here for four days and only in a tiny screening room in a film school. I loved it but my wife and my friend who saw it with us weren't too sure. I thought that it was mostly pretty easy to understand, especially as compared with Primer. I'm really encouraged at how Carruth as come as a filmmaker since that first movie, Upstream Color is just beautifully made: great to look at, listen to and think about.
posted by octothorpe at 7:27 PM on April 28, 2013

I saw him talk about it after a showing in new york and he said one or two things about it that kinda explained it in the sense that I went from "Hmm that was weird and great but totally incomprehensible" to "HOLY SHIT THAT WAS THE BEST MOVIE EVER"
AskMeAnything
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:27 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Upstream Color is nothing like Mullholland Drive in my opinion.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:28 PM on April 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

I've already described it as a Terrence Malick film with maggots, pigs and a sad lack of GWAR.
posted by Catblack at 7:30 PM on April 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

I also think Terrence Malick isn't an accurate comparison. Not least of which because Carruth desires to make a very complicated idea real to the audience rather than just blind them with imagery.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:33 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

I also think Terrence Malick isn't an accurate comparison. Not least of which because Carruth desires to make a very complicated idea real to the audience rather than just blind them with imagery.

Them's fightin' words.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:37 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'd start a fight with you Rory but I just don't have a month to wait for you to carefully compose each comeback.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:40 PM on April 28, 2013 [3 favorites]

I'm not saying Malick isnt a good director (and a great one in his early years) but Upstream Color is different from Malick (or at least Tree of Life) in that it has a very explicable, though incredibly difficult, rhetorical through-line. It's like a very short, condensed, tip-of-the-iceberg version of the Wire. It's the most innovative movie I've seen in a decade, I think.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:45 PM on April 28, 2013

Yeah, I thought about Infinite Jest a couple of times, watching this. The plot is straight-forward, and I think a couple of times in the film things are actually belabored*, in contrast to Primer. Also I feel like there's more meaningful intent and agency in this film than a typical Mallick film.

I'd be interested in what Shane Carruth and people here think about Triangle, which maybe needed a lighter touch with tone and symbolism but was still for me a cerebral event like Primer. This film just feels like it was made to devour, intellectually and aesthetically. For example (SPOILERS below - we don't have a tag for that?)









1. the shared childhood memory issue escalating the way it did
2. the ominous pig-farm sampling and pregnancy issue
3. the woman protagonist's mistake
4. the essential disconnect, information-wise, between all the working parts

*The sadness of the nursery woman after seeing that there are no more blue flowers, and the resulting lack of worms.
posted by legospaceman at 7:47 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Carruth has made two films nine years apart from each other. That's less frequently even than Malick's oeuvre.
posted by Rory Marinich at 7:48 PM on April 28, 2013

Man, I'm so tempted to read the OP review/other reviews but I really don't want to spoil it, and the endorsements in this thread are making that really really hard
posted by p3on at 7:48 PM on April 28, 2013

He would have made it sooner but he spent a few years making a computer animated science fiction movie that the studio (or someone) pulled the plug on because it sounded TOO AWESOME. You'll notice (not really a spoiler at all) that the protagonist of UC is working on a failing computer animation project of some kind at the start of the film.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 7:52 PM on April 28, 2013

Apparently there is a .pdf of A Topiary making the rounds. I don't know if I should hold off on reading it. It's clear he's moving on to Modern Ocean.

I've watched Primer about 10 times. The last few times, it wasn't so much about working out kinks as it was the tone of the thing, the eeriness, the creepiness. One of the interviews he references this himself - the feeling that things are not quite the way they should be. "Because when Aaron came back the second time..." Something about what he holds back just makes it brainfood. It reminds me of the gap a good joke sometimes leave in place for people to jump across. The rush of recognition that your brain joyfully fills in. This film is the same, even moreso.

I'm going to re-watch it tonight. For those so inclined, it does exist in the wilds of the internet.
posted by legospaceman at 8:02 PM on April 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

there is a .pdf of A Topiary making the rounds.

:o linkplz
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:05 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

I loved Primer but Upstream Color ... not so much. Although it was at times visually interesting, I like my movies to have a plot and a storyline and a resolution of some sort (even if ambiguous) none of which this movie really, truly had. The no plot and no storyline may be arguable as I went online and eventually figured out the story from various sources but I would argue that if you can't actually tell what the actual story is then there is really no story.

If you think you might enjoy spending 10 or 15 bucks to spend 90 minutes watching something that you will leave wondering what it is you just watched then this movie may be for you. Also this movie is most definitely not science fiction and I don't know why it is being marketed that way. The movie is far more of a (very) post-modern fantasy but I suppose calling it "sci-fi" is easier to understand and potentially more marketable.

FWIW I also thought that Inception was vastly over-rated .
posted by Podkayne of Pasadena at 8:17 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

I don't live anywhere near somewhere this is likely to be playing, and it's going to be available for digital download in not too long. People who've seen it: is this a movie that must must must be seen on the big screen (like I would argue that Tree of Life is) or will I get close to the full experience in a dark room very close to my laptop?
posted by vogon_poet at 8:31 PM on April 28, 2013

On Friday I saw Upstream Color in the afternoon and thought about it all evening and the next morning. Saturday afternoon I saw Oblivion, shrugged, and went back to thinking about Upstream Color.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:35 PM on April 28, 2013 [7 favorites]

Potomac Ave: http://www.sendspace.com/file/yyez4r

vogon: watched it on a 24" monitor, it was lovely. I could have put it on the 40whatever inch flatscreen but wasn't specially inclined. I think it'll be great with decent headphones.

Podkayne: dude, there's a clear narrative. This is not Inception. Or Looper for that matter. I heard Carruth was involved and it was made by the guy who did Brick. I don't think Hollywood has ever let me down harder than that.
posted by legospaceman at 8:35 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm completely confused that there are still people claiming Inception is somehow challenging or ambiguous, I mean, he DREW A MAP of the damn thing for the people that were perplexed, can we get over it and move on? I enjoyed the film but for heaven's sake folks stop pretending it's something that it's not.

I'm really looking forward to seeing Upstream Color again, it struck me as something that will be enjoyable to tease apart on repeated viewings (I also adored Primer, but in a very different way).
posted by trackofalljades at 8:57 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Yeah I phrased that wrong. I just meant this is not [a poorly-made movie like] Inception (or Looper).
posted by legospaceman at 9:07 PM on April 28, 2013 [1 favorite]

Interview with Andrew Sensenig, the mysterious sampler in Upstream Color, from the Stand By For Mind Control blog.
posted by damehex at 9:35 PM on April 28, 2013

I'm a huge fan of Primer (first saw it during the 2004 Toronto Film Festival), so I'm very interested in Upstream Color, but the feedback I've seen around the web has me worried that it's more like a piece of performance art where the plot is conveyed through a series of interpretive dances. I'm still on the fence.
posted by ceribus peribus at 10:46 PM on April 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

I just watched it. Feel like I 'got' the whole thing, though I am definitely looking forward to watching it again with a somewhat keener eye for camera placement and character framing. It's one of those films that fills its own gaps in, on subsequent thought or viewings. But from the perspective of expectations for plot, narrative, and dialogue the gaps might be too big for some people.

Wish I didn't have to go to sleep now, I'd watch it again.
posted by carsonb at 11:00 PM on April 28, 2013

I watched this a couple nights ago, and found it beautiful, baffling, and kind of boring. To the extent it's provoked thoughts, they're mostly about snarky summaries involving worms and wondering if watching Malick's last couple films wouldn't be more rewarding than trying to rewatch it.

TLDR: pretty, disappointing.
posted by unmake at 11:17 PM on April 28, 2013

I thought UC was awful. Mind-numbingly awful. Only the third movie I've actually walked out on during my thirty years on this planet. It's a classic over-hyped arthouse masturbation. Style over substance to the nth degree.
posted by matt_od at 11:43 PM on April 28, 2013 [2 favorites]

Though I'm glad someone else walked out of this movie (well, my partner left with me), I admit I left because I was expecting something a little more art house/masturbatory. It was so straightforward, honestly uninteresting, and seemed overall so problematically misogynistic that I was just annoyed enough to waste that $11.

Everytime the dialogue sets up a little Q&A between the main love interest characters, the woman just sat there like window dressing while the guy had something to share. I understand totally that their characters were supposed to be robotic, lacking something tangible, mysteriously changed...but as soon as the movie established that the woman existed primarily to fulfill that special, biological, movie-lady niche, I just got disgusted. It's great to comment on gendered and societal roles but just using them as they appear in day to day life and assuming I'm blown away by how art house the film tried to be (and thus assuming that I'm interpreting social commentary) is pretty lazy.

I really wanted to like it! I think I'm just spoiled by the amount of actually, properly, intentionally deep independent film that's out there.
posted by zinful at 12:41 AM on April 29, 2013 [2 favorites]

Give us some examples, zinful.
posted by legospaceman at 2:51 AM on April 29, 2013

Loved Primer, hated Upstream Color.
posted by fairmettle at 3:17 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

For those who want to read "The Topiary" script.
Not sure if it's the true thing...
posted by huguini at 3:45 AM on April 29, 2013

If you can't tell the difference between grackles and starlings...
posted by Thorzdad at 4:33 AM on April 29, 2013 [2 favorites]

I watched this last night. It's not something I feel like I need to watch again, but it was clearly the vision of a lone auteur, and quite a beautiful one at that, which is something I can totally get behind.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 4:53 AM on April 29, 2013

If only it were about random connections between Toxoplasma gondii-infected YouTube cat video posters... And directed by Miranda July.
posted by unmake at 5:53 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

Now that all the noobs who haven't seen it have moved on, let's talk ending.

IMO that was a bleak and almost horror-movie way to end up--in the dark, deluded, full of false self-satisfaction and in danger of beginning the cycle anew.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:18 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

Potomac, I don't Carruth said in the Q&A, but the impression I got was that it was a happy ending; the lifecycle of the entity had been broken, and no new people could become infected.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:26 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

I with that Carruth had been more involved in Looper, maybe it wouldn't have been so lame. I actually just watched that for the first time this weekend after having missed it in the theaters and was pretty let down by all the hype it had gotten.
posted by octothorpe at 6:27 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

the lifecycle of the entity had been broken, and no new people could become infected.

----MANY SPOILERS-----

True but at what cost to the hero? She never found out anything about the true nature of the cycle. Even though she stopped the production of the bugs, all the elements remain in place that could be restarted if something goes wrong on the farm. She hasnt escaped her damaged past-- merely found a way to lie to herself about it and continue to live in a grotesque illusion. Maybe that's supposed to be the best we can do as individuals who have lost our identities, but it doesn't look like real healing or happiness to me. Plus, the thief remains unpunished and the sampler, who is relatively benign, has to die. Justice certainly isn't the point, but it can hardly be called satisfying in a traditional sense, and I think Carruth knows that.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:34 AM on April 29, 2013

it doesn't look like real healing or happiness to me.

Why not? She's certainly still damaged at the end of the film, but she now has a chance at happiness. The Sampler was not benign, he was actively causing most of her pain and confusion throughout the second and third acts of the film. He most certainly had to die.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 6:46 AM on April 29, 2013 [2 favorites]

@louche mustachio --

sure, but mulling over complex things is part of (re)experiencing them -- that's how religion mediates/elaborates 'spiritual' experiences, right? by layering signification on what was a 'pure' thing, trading its 'purity' (bullshit anyway) away for a density of association that might not come with the Thing Itself all by itself.

i really enjoyed southland tales in the theatre, for instance, but talking about it, rewatching a few sequences, and revisiting it in memory as if it were a philip k dick story have made it into something bigger and more reusable in my mind. whereas mulholland drive was beautiful bullshit to me right from the start, and thinking about its 'plot' has been (for me) a pointless intellectual exercise rather than a deepening alternate emotional engagement, fight club has both grown (as a Statement About Modern Men) and shrunk (as a statement about anyone/anything else) in my esteem over the years.

(philip k dick is the classic 'grower not a shower' writer in my mind. the experience of reading his novels lasts for weeks after you've turned the last page, despite the middlingness of his prose qua prose.)

my favourite art tends to grow into (interpenetrate) other stuff in my mind -- gravity's rainbow wasn't my favourite novel when i read it, just an Amazing one, but now it's a big part of how i think about literature, and i'll come back to it in a few years with an eye for its esoteric weirdness, historical richness, and melancholy beauty (rather than all the things that impressed (upon) me back in the day)...

sorry, just carrying on here.
posted by waxbanks at 7:03 AM on April 29, 2013 [2 favorites]

waxbanks, back in the day, Salon did a coherent summary of what Mulholland Drive was about. It almost makes the movie make sense.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 7:35 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

Why not?

Because she has mistaken the source of her problem (she never understands anything about the thief) and the solution to it (which would be to forgive herself and move on). Her connection with the pig is based on this infection that stole her identity, not on anything real. Her mewling over the wrong species of child, living in a place that enslaved her, unable to regain a real life--it's literally grotesque. The happiness is a lie. Maybe that's what happiness is? But that's even bleaker than a tragedy.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:07 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

It just hit me--Carruth's closest analogue is Kubrick.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:46 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

I saw it in our local arthouse theater this past Saturday and loved it. But I will say that there were moments I thought I was going to have to leave, because the sound design is so intense. If you're sensitive to jarring sounds, this can be a very uncomfortable movie physically. But well worth it.

Also, I knew going in that Carruth wrote, produced and directed it, but didn't find out until after the fact that that was him playing the main role. Since when are visionary artists allowed to be classically handsome, too? That hardly seems fair.
posted by jbickers at 10:51 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

Also, I knew going in that Carruth wrote, produced and directed it, but didn't find out until after the fact that that was him playing the main role

He's listed as writer, actor, producer, director, editor, composer, cinematographer and camera operator.
posted by octothorpe at 11:37 AM on April 29, 2013 [1 favorite]

The only person more obnoxiously talented is Mark Duplass because he's also really funny. Shane's great but I can't see him hosting SNL.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 11:44 AM on April 29, 2013

So, are we at the point where we're talking about spoilers? Because I have a question ...






---------------------------

Why does The Sampler do what he does? What's his business model? Carruth said in an interview that he is not aware of the Thief and what he does, so it's not the money. I could see that maybe he's just a pig farmer who has a record label selling weird soundtracks ... but then, why does he keep appearing in the lives of the Sampled, looking at them? What's he looking for? What's he getting out of all this?
posted by jbickers at 12:36 PM on April 29, 2013

An attempt at answering jbickers' spoileriffic question:






[GO WATCH THE MOVIE]




He's sampling emotions gleaned from the pigs using his otherworldly connection to them (and to the people who they're connected to), and using the emotional tones to inspire his musical work. The emotional honesty and directness that's witnessed in the 'pigs' is directly reflected in his musical compositions. At least that's what Carruth gets around to mentioning in one of the interviews linked above.
posted by carsonb at 1:11 PM on April 29, 2013

In short though I think it's to make art. Not sure what the raising of the pigs has to do exactly with his art (good theory carsonb), but it does, and his CDs are the result. But then also, the bugs live on in the pigs right? So his control of them might have something to do instead with maintaining a connection with the identity destroyers that possessed him at some point.

Why he kills the babies though: witness the pig that got sick -- the woman that tried to kill herself. Somehow he thinks mating is bad for the stock. He kills the babies to drive the two apart, to protect them and maybe to protect his art?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:17 PM on April 29, 2013

Potomac, you need to come to an IRL so that I can discuss this with you over alcohol -- the way it was meant to be discussed.

The pigs need to die (and be dumped in the river) in order to complete the bug's lifecycle. I'm not sure if the Sampler is aware of that, though. I think the Sampler deliberately manipulates the pigs in order to cause stress in the pigs' human counterparts, which gives the Sampler emotions that he can harvest.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:36 PM on April 29, 2013

I think the Sampler deliberately manipulates the pigs in order to cause stress in the pigs' human counterparts, which gives the Sampler emotions that he can harvest.

I could see that.

It went by so quickly, I wasn't able to read the names of the CDs that the guy bought ... did anybody catch either artist or album title? I think there were 5-6 of them.
posted by jbickers at 1:46 PM on April 29, 2013

According to this review one of the CDs says "Extractions". The name of the label replaced the artist on the sleeve. I think we'll know more once it's out on DDL and the obsessives really start to pick through it.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:53 PM on April 29, 2013

My big question is how did Kris know how to find the Sampler to get her bug removed? Was she called there by the loudspeakers?
posted by 1970s Antihero at 1:54 PM on April 29, 2013

Yes, definitely, except that I viewed it as the bug itself being called there by a sound much like blood streaming through veins.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 1:56 PM on April 29, 2013

My big question is how did Kris know how to find the Sampler to get her bug removed? Was she called there by the loudspeakers?

See "worm grunting."
posted by Iridic at 2:38 PM on April 29, 2013 [2 favorites]

If we're getting into SPOILERy questions: where did Kris go after the surgery and before waking up in a van on the side of the highway? That clinic-looking place, where she trudged down a hall lined with blurry people before entering a room and playing with a faucet?
posted by Iridic at 3:01 PM on April 29, 2013

here are the quinoa valley cd's:
Repetico
Extractions
Artifacts
Echo Trilogy: Part 2
Reverberations
posted by p3on at 5:29 PM on April 29, 2013 [2 favorites]

That clinic-looking place, where she trudged down a hall lined with blurry people before entering a room and playing with a faucet?

I saw that scene as an allegory or projection into the mind of the newly wormed-up pig joining the Sampler's flock.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:52 AM on April 30, 2013 [6 favorites]

Oh I saw that as quite literally a recovery ward since she'd just had surgery. I wasn't clear on when/if she actually had endometrial cancer, if that was why the worm wouldn't leave (or if it just never left anybody), and what exactly he was doing with her and the pig. The scene flashed very quickly, were they connected by the worm itself (moving from her to the pig) or was that a transfusion of some kind?

It was also unclear how long she'd been away from work - it seemed like weeks but not months so I'm not sure how that fits the recovery timeframe for surgery.

Yup, this film gets in your head. Differently than Primer did, and differently than Mulholland Drive, but I liked both of those very much for very similar reasons.
posted by abulafa at 10:57 AM on April 30, 2013

Thanks to this post I was able to catch it this afternoon before the run ends on Thursday. There were about 30 people there, and it looked like five people left early, separately. After the movie ended it was totally quiet and still in the theatre all the way through the end of the credits, which I thought was interesting.

I agree with Podkayne of Pasadena that calling it Sci-Fi is really a misnomer. Maybe it's because I just saw it last week and, you know, crawly things, but I was reminded of Bug. The sense of dread and ambiguous mental (and physical) state of the characters really felt more like a psychological thriller, and I think I would have enjoyed it more if that was my expectation going in.

*The sadness of the nursery woman after seeing that there are no more blue flowers, and the resulting lack of worms.

I didn't see that as sadness, I saw it as recognizing that IT was over (whatever IT is/was, and for better or worse.)

If you're sensitive to jarring sounds, this can be a very uncomfortable movie physically.

Oh jeez, yes.
posted by Room 641-A at 8:12 PM on April 30, 2013

It just hit me--Carruth's closest analogue is Kubrick.

I wish.
posted by fairmettle at 4:55 AM on May 1, 2013

Carruth obviously has influences from Kubrick but by this time, how many directors don't?
posted by octothorpe at 10:53 AM on May 1, 2013

I just read David Edelstein's review, and I love this bit:

Perhaps if too much info were added, you wouldn’t be as spellbound. It would be as if Stanley Kubrick had showed a bunch of aliens watching Keir Dullea eat his peas and saying, “I think these Earthlings might be ready for us now.” You probably wouldn’t watch 2001 for the eighth time with the same sense of wonder—and I wouldn’t be readying myself for a third go-round with Upstream Color.
posted by jbickers at 11:16 AM on May 1, 2013 [1 favorite]

Wait, Room 641-A, you saw it at the Sundance theater? And the run ends today? Shit.
posted by carsonb at 10:59 AM on May 2, 2013

carsonb, I saw it at the Laemmle on 2nd in Santa Monica.
posted by Room 641-A at 6:54 AM on May 4, 2013

It's available online now on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and a no-DRM download.
posted by octothorpe at 10:33 AM on May 7, 2013 [1 favorite]

Having finally seen this, I can definitely say I was glad of the experience. Very much like Primer, it's a movie you definitely have to grapple with a bit to get much out of on first viewing, and the effort of doing so can be satisfying and pleasurable.

It's dreamlike, but not for its own sake. The surreal elements, the apparently random editing and juxtaposition, even the soundscape are all there to communicate a concrete narrative, even if it's being oblique about it. It's like a puzzle, and I can understand why not everyone wants to sit down and watch a puzzle, but I'm pretty amazed that anyone walked out on this film.

9 years is too long to wait between Shane Carruth movies. Maybe he could try to delegate just a little.

I'll need to rewatch it, but not for a while yet.
posted by figurant at 9:43 PM on May 10, 2013

The Thoreau Poison: Shane Carruth's 'Upstream Color'
posted by homunculus at 11:42 AM on May 11, 2013 [9 favorites]

It was absolutely amazing.
posted by codacorolla at 3:22 PM on May 18, 2013

Showing Hollywood the way: how 'Upstream Color' hit iTunes without leaving theaters
posted by octothorpe at 12:35 PM on May 20, 2013