Upstream Color Establishes Shane Carruth As The Future Of Indie Film

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Apr 11, 2013 9:40PM

Shane Carruth wrote, directed and stars in Upstream Color. (© 2012 - erbp)

Easy on the eyes but hard on themselves, two survivors of a complex biological attack combine their lives into one, the intensity of their love promising transcendence of past traumas. Except maybe their joined forces also constitute an incarnation of a third life, an organism detected by bluish compound scraped from the beneath the leaf of a hothouse flower, or extracted from a living grub by boiling water and drunk like tea, or stuffed into a pill and dangled by a pusher outside a club, or wafting into a stream from the corpse of a decomposing animal.

Wait. What?

Something as ineffable, as messy and as resistant to summation as life itself courses through Shane Carruth's Upstream Color, which is expanding its theatrical release nationwide April 12. Upstream Color is full of wondrous things that don't always make a lot of sense. It is at once a heart-stopping romantic thriller, an inscrutable sci-fi potboiler, and an essay on identity and existence. Watching it is an experience which will leave many exasperated and many others enraptured by an elliptical narrative the viewer must help synthesize from a deviously abridged collection of clues.

Upstream Color is challenging to wrap your head around. Kris (Amy Seimetz) is drugged into a sort of fugue state by a robber, who exploits her resulting suggestibility to take her for everything she's worth. When she comes to, it's not just her bank account, but also her bodily integrity and sense of identity which seem to have been compromised. She drifts blankly along until encountering Jeff (Carruth), who feels a connection to her that seems to be based on sharing that experience. Together they work at rebuilding their lives while uncovering the mystery of what has happened, or happening, to them.

Here's what we're supposed to tell you: Carruth made a little film called Primer in 2004, and it knocked everyone's socks off. It was the smartest, densest, most economical time travel movie ever created, and the filmmaker did it all with an ingenious script and $7,000. It won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance that year, and devoted fans are still working on a map of this little head trip. It was dense with ideas and wholly original. It was also close to impossible to understand the first time through.

Upstream Color still has the bracing freshness of a prodigious autodidact and something like the crackle of a writer who has mastered an adopted tongue's grammar but is still relishing the quirks of its syntax rather than striving for complete transparency. Not that there are no touchstones here, such as the body horror of vintage David Cronenberg and the deft timeline jumbling of Steven Soderbergh. The film is full of rapturously beautiful images which will draw comparisons to Terrence Malick's cosmic lyricism. Yet Carruth's voice is his own. In fact, he may now just be the poster-boy for American independent cinema: He not only wrote, directed, starred-in, co-edited and supplied the original music for this film, but also is successfully self-distributing it as well.

We've had to wait nine years for the encore to Primer, and it turns out to be worth the wait. You just have to be ready for a mind-bender that doesn't spell everything out for you. The film would not work if it did not speak to human condition: We are all thrown into existence and left to piece together our own story like amnesiacs, looking for others who understand us, angry about the sufferings we don't deserve, suspecting or perhaps hoping that we are all connected by something we don't see and can't understand. This is not the type of movie one goes to see to escape the world, but to better equip ourselves for negotiating it.

Upstream Color

Written and directed by Shane Carruth.
With Carruth, Amy Seimetz and Andrew Sensenig.
Running time 96 minutes
No rating

Upstream Color opens Friday, April 12, at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave. There will be two screenings with director Shane Carruth in attendance and one screening of his first film, Primer. Tickets are on sale now.