UPSTREAM COLOR - "..."

A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives. - IMDb

Upstream Color is the second film by Shane Carruth, the writer/director/star of the critically acclaimed time travel movie, Primer. Where the inherent complexities of that movie's plot requires a near overload of expository dialogue (and still manages to be challenging to follow), Upstream Color takes the opposite approach. We never see the main characters speak to each other about what's going on. We see what they do and what happens to them, and those actions build on each other so that we understand why later things are done. It's the definition of being shown, rather than told, and it's done very effectively.

It's difficult to talk about the film without making it sound pretentious - it can be argued that it is. But watching the movie felt like looking at and being affected by a powerful work of art. There are long stretches of the movie without any dialogue, but Carruth (who also composed the score) uses music and sound, as well as beautiful visuals, to keep the audience engaged in the story.

None of that would be nearly effective without the strong performances of both Carruth and Amy Seimetz. When the movie begins, her character is a strong, confident woman who seems to have her life under control. After the inciting incident (which I won't spoil) she transforms into almost an entirely different woman. She has lost trust in not only everyone else, but, more importantly, herself.

Upstream Color is the type of science fiction I enjoy the most. It's not about the technology involved, or even about the ramifications of that technology on a society. Instead, it uses the premise to explore characters in new and different ways.