Why you should watch “Upstream Color”

Heady themes merge with bizarre experimentation in Shane Carruth’s masterpiece.

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Live with someone long enough, love someone hard enough, and a strange alchemy occurs. The walls we build up as individuals grow thin, becoming more like membranes than solid matter. Given enough time and trust, little droplets of personality begin to seep through. What emerges is less a collection of parts than the creation of a new, shared identity. It can be a messy process, tinged with the slippery panic of a drug trip. Personal trauma ruptures, spilling into the other. Psychic damage is transmitted, and mental illness proves contagious. We go through it because it’s better than enduring alone. Or because we are compelled. 

In the same vein, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color can be viewed as a surreal, disjointed romance. Two characters engage in a process reminiscent of falling into feverish love: Jeff (played by Carruth), and Kris (Amy Seimetz), are broken people driven together by virtue of shared trauma. Their relationship takes place within and alongside a story that involves an ageless organism, pig surgery, and mind-control. 

This is not a movie to watch if you’re feeling linear. The plot, such as it is, consists of a dreamlike stream of complementary images and motifs. There is the central love story, a group of nematode-toting con artists intent on committing the most complex and unnerving identity theft in cinema history, and also something to do with Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Critic Scott Willson notes that Jeff and Kris only interact with a small piece of a massive, interconnected web of events. Ultimately, they remain stranded in the midst of an unknowable universe. Although the film is both emotionally satisfying and thematically comprehensible, it remains deeply ambiguous. In an interview with Indiewire, Carruth likened the film to Heart of Darkness: “this is going upriver to solve the problem,” he said, and the viewer has no choice but to abandon themselves to the stream. 

By film’s end Kris will face those responsible for what’s been done to her. But what has been done? How much of what she’s experienced has taken place inside her head? That she and Jeff have been altered in some way seems undeniable, and both are compelled by forces beyond their control. That their story feels so accessible is a testament to Carruth’s skill as a filmmaker. Upstream Color, like the best kind of love, presents an unsolvable mystery, one where the inexplicable and the horrible are transfigured into something new. 

Upstream Color is available on Amazon Prime and Vudu.

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