Upstream Color
is a movie by Shane Carruth who is the same guy who did Primer (which is the best time travel movie ever) and is one of the most moving and challenging films I've seen recently.
It's like a dream. Half of the movie you spend watching short vignettes which originally don't seem to make sense or be related at all but eventually come together in a quietly unsettling and oddly touching story about two people who meet, fall in love, and have to deal with the consequences of being with each other.
Besides not wanting to ruin the plot for anyone who might want to see it and hasn't let me explain why I'm not going to:
To explain the plot of this movie will make it sound stupid.
It's like explaining Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind to someone. It's all over the place and weird and makes sense when you're watching it but sounds awful and ridiculous when you describe it to someone else.
Except the film isn't like that. It's like poetry.
For instance. The scenes which depict the evolution of the relationship between the two main characters is so perfectly shot and cut together that it seems like the same conversation over and over again, which is really what most relationships are, but they convey the passage of time in a way that doesn't feel like a cheap montage conveying the passage of time.
But it's scary. As the story progresses and begins to unfold it becomes this thing more complex and questioning than just a romance, or just a speculative fiction film. It ends with more questions than when it started and watching it makes you feel there's something beneath the surface that you missed.
Which is why I liked it. Upstream Color wasn't just a blockbuster movie about love or humanity or fate, it was a work of art which pushed the boundaries of what it means to make a film that questions the world and our place in it.
Now I'm really excited to see what happens with The Modern Ocean
