Daniel D'Addario: Everything you were afraid to ask about Upstream Color

Everything you were afraid to ask about “Upstream Color”: Pigs! Mental breakdowns! Nematodes! "Walden"! We answer all your questions about 2013's strangest film
By Daniel D'Addario
Salon



It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that a science-fiction relationship drama depicting the life cycle of a neurotoxin-cum-immortal force that passes from nematode to human to pig and back again might get audiences confused.

What’s surprising is that it has them applauding.

“Upstream Color,” an at-first-blush incomprehensible movie by “Primer” filmmaker Shane Carruth, has earned qualified raves since its first screening at Sundance this year. Said Hollywood Reporter critic Todd McCarthy:

“The experience of watching the film, especially this first section, is highly visceral and sensuous; the images possess a crystalline clarity that is exquisite, and they’re dispersed in rapid rhythmic waves[...] All this will seem profound to some and mean nothing to those who never got algebra.”

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir struck a similar note:

“I was immediately drawn in by the mysterious, meticulous world of vision, sound and sensation Carruth creates, with its blown-out digital color scheme and intimate focus, which simultaneously seems to be contemporary America and also an alien zone of disconnection and isolation.”

The film, which has been playing in New York for a week and begins its nationwide rollout today, is likely to earn many similar plaudits: admiration for Carruth’s technique in creating compelling images, tempered by confusion over just what, exactly, those images mean on a metaphorical or even minute-to-minute level. But close viewing of “Upstream Color” will reward even the reader who pulled a B-minus in middle-school algebra — the mysteries are revealed, but simply at a pace that is a bit more laborious than the average film.

What follows is one reporter’s untangling of the mysteries of “Upstream Color,” informed by a recapitulation of the film itself and then public statements Carruth has made.

Spoiler-phobes ought to stop reading now — with the caveat that knowing how the film works in advance might do the opposite of spoiling the movie. It might just save the diligent viewer a return trip to the theater to attempt to decode “Upstream Color’s” secrets.

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