Shane Carruth's previous film, Primer, is a very clinical and cold film, yet nine years later he returns with Upstream Color, a film grounded in emotion and warmth. This is a film with a love story at its core, and like Primer, the science fiction elements are secondary to the exploration of the character's relationship. Since this film hasn't reached a wide release yet, I will spend the first paragraph addressing why one should see it, without spoilers, and then I will continue with my analysis of the film.

Upstream Color is a film that expects a lot from its audience, and the form of the film is definitely challenging. Yet Carruth grounds his film in the characters, and the…

Shane Carruth’s belated follow-up to his befuddling debut, Primer, proves no less puzzling yet for markedly different reasons. Primer was intricately plotted yet, given the time and inclination, its multiple narratives could be untangled. Upstream Color is far more abstract and elusive and I suspect clarity will never be forthcoming no matter how many times you attempt to decipher its mysteries. It is also a far more emotionally engaging story compared to the sterile coldness of his time travel darling.

Upstream Color is a woozy and elegiac tale of love, loss and connections. Its story is not easily explained, not without reducing its plot to New Age twaddle, nor easily understood. It is dense, thematically perplexing and hauntingly hallucinatory -…

Shane Carruth’s alluring Upstream Color is Invasion of the Body Snatchers for the art house crowd, with hogs replacing pods and identity crisis substituting for McCarthyism. That may be an awfully crude comparison but it’s the overall gist I got as I watched this beguiling, beautiful film. One thing’s for sure, the plot’s mind-control science fiction aspect plays only second fiddle to the transcendent yet universal overarching theme of emotional resonance in people in the vein of Henry David Thoreau’s literature. This is an ambitious, dense, slippery piece of experimental filmmaking with big ideas and Carruth conveys these enthralling notions through a masterwork in poetic editing, shot composition, and aural design.

First thing going in to this movie is to…

"I have to apologize... I was born with a disfigurement where my head is made of the same material as the sun."

one of the only love stories in recent memory that actually *does* make sense. certain films are often (and lazily) described as the kind of thing that you need to see twice, but it truly is sadistically cruel that the end of this film doesn’t immediately loop around to the beginning… not to plug holes, but to heal tissue.

a true headphone movie, if ever there was such a thing, it’s an analog romance about collective memory and fundamental togetherness, elliptically edited to the extreme, but done so with such organic forward motion that - at its best…

Shane Carruth when asked, what Upstream Color meant, reluctantly said that he does not prefer for it to have any single, specific interpretation. This statement, I comprehended to be his way of indirectly saying that if he were to spell out what it actually meant then it would take all the sheen, mesmerising beauty and the enigma of the film away. This is almost him saying he prefers people to come out with their own ideas and theories of it. Not only Upstream Color, but any abstract form of art deserves to be open to various interpretations, providing fodder for the brains of those who experience it and satisfaction that what they believe is the truth and that it was…

I'm nearly four full days removed from experiencing this film and I'm not sure I'm any closer to unravelling what it's all about. To me it was a film about shared experiences and relationships; where do our memories come from and are they our own? The images in the film and the questions it implanted in my brain have remained with me since I left the cinema; I don't think I will be rid of them any time soon.

There is a scene, a beautiful, lyrical scene where the two lead characters are discussing specific memories, essentially arguing over who owns them. This served to sum up most of what I felt the film was about, but it was also…

The film follows Kris (Amy Seimetz), a woman whose life is thrown into disarray after she is drugged by a thief and forced to give him every asset she owns. Kris works a numbing name-tag job until she meets Jeff (Carruth), a financier for whom she feels an inexplicable attraction and undeniable connection. Using that connection Carruth explores themes of self-determination, free will and the inexorable cycle of life

It engages intellectually but is also deeply emotionally satisfying. . It wouldn't be hyperbolic to say that the film stands completely outside the modern cinematic idiom. "Upstream Color" is striking in many ways, most prominently in how astoundingly precise it is. There isn't a single wasted frame in the film, and…

Shane Carruth’s org chart of a first film, Primer, was built for Redditors before Reddit existed, a puzzle box to be analyzed ad nauseum by online avatars with long numbers behind their screen names. While Carruth’s DIY debut about garage entrepreneurs discovering time travel probably shook out into a coherent structure, who could possibly care when the characters surrounding that plot are so flat and the environment they operate in is so visually bland? Carruth’s follow-up, Upstream Color, immediately showcases a major leap in technical talent, though he’s still a bargain-basement filmmaker with a five figure budget up from four. Shot in color this time with a dreamy Malickian vibe, Carruth unfolds a sci-fi romance out of mind control, identity…