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Upstream Color Movie Review

Upstream Color is a 2013 experimental science fiction film directed by Shane Carruth and starring himself opposite Amy Seimetz. It’s one of 2013’s worst movies.

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“I have to apologize. I was born with a disfigurement

where my head is made of the same material as the sun“

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Entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism, a man and a woman are drawn together. As they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives, identity becomes an illusion. Shane Carruth is a very frustrating filmmaker to me. His movie ‘Primer’ focused on all of the worst elements when it comes to the time travel concept and narrative – confusion and incoherence. Upstream Color fared even worse – it’s his previous film coupled with Terrence Malick-inspired faux artistry.

This is one of those movies where so many themes and messages can be forced upon it, but the film itself did none of the work to actually include those elements itself. Many would say that it’s about the interconnectedness between humans and other living things, but the director failed to explore any of it properly, making you do the homework yourself. That would have been fine if I had been at all interested to do that work, but I never was given that the movie infuriated me with its refusal to include any meaningful plot or even a single sequence that made any sense.

Upstream Color has two non-characters basically. We learn nothing about these two people and the acting is far from great, especially from Carruth himself, who was quite mediocre. Seimetz fared better, but her character was also thin as paper. Their relationship was undercooked.

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The movie has some memorable imagery, I will give it that. The main poster depicting the two protagonists entangled in the bathtub was definitely intriguing. The scenes with the parasites were repulsive, but undeniably striking. The visual language of the film is quite strong and the score is also very good. It’s a cinematic feature, so at least it offered views something interesting to observe from time to time, but not nearly enough to compensate for its lack of narrative, point or purpose. The editing is also haphazard and the director just piled odd imagery on top of one another in the striving to be artistic, but he only achieved boredom and frustration to anyone who isn’t a self-proclaimed cinephile and/or artist.