Review of Upstream Color (2013) by Al M — 12 Jul 2013

The second film from Shane Carruth, the director of the indie sci-fi masterpiece Primer, Upstream Color is a difficult, original, and brilliant as cinema can get. Essentially another low-key sci-fi film, Upstream Color concerns a drug derived from worms which themselves are fed on specific orchids.

As with Primer, the viewer must put together some of the logic on their own as the film moves circularly and elliptically through the events in the life of a woman who was drugged, hypnotized, robbed, and left to wonder what happened.

She meets a man who may or may not have undergone the same experience. They proceed to cultivate a rather odd affair with these deep traumas always hovering in the background. I won't give away more of the film other than to say it is about the interconnectedness of the whole natural world, something that even sentient beings can escape from.

This leads to fundamental existential questions of the film that pertain to how we define identity, how our identities become entangled with others and with our environment, and ultimately how we choose to determine what is real and fantasy .

What is memory and what is hallucination? The film's title Upstream Color has a very literal meaning, but it also refers to the beautiful or possibly horrific forces that seep into and shape us like dye into the skin of a white flower.

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