Primer was an interesting one, wasn't it? Baffling and intriguing in equal measures, it's writer and director Shane Carruth was a master of distance - always one (or seven) steps ahead of the audience but never out of sight. He does the same with Upstream Colour but this time I must admit I have no clue what is going on here. This is a good and a bad thing.
Kris (Seimetz) is attacked and drugged one night by a thief who force-feeds her larva, a special type that he has spent years cultivating and which make his victims susceptible to his demands upon ingesting. Holed up in her apartment for days, the hypnotised Kris signs away all her money before the thief makes off, leaving her with nothing but haunting visions of worms moving under her skin. Driven to self-harm by these visions, Kris stumbles out into the desert and finds a pig farmer (Sensenig), who helps draw the worms out using sound. Years later, Kris meets Jeff (Carruth), but her troubled past is a barrier their relationship advancing…
Where did I lose you? Was it the larva? Hypnotism? It was the pig farmer, right? Yeah, the pig farmer threw me too and after that I was struggling to keep a grasp on unfolding events. And I haven't even mentioned that the pig farmer roams about the place observing people a la Bruzo Ganz in Wings of Desire. No clue what's going on at all. The quotes from Henry David Thoreau's Walden suggest some sort of transcendentalism or a shared consciousness is involved. The dialogue tries to help but it's sparse and sounds like it's culled from a half-remembered dream.
Carruth, who not only wrote and directed this, but also shot, edited and composed the music, revisits the minimalist story-telling style of Primer. Questions, questions, and more questions abound but Carruth remains tight-lipped. A mystery is fine but when you're kept in the dark for so long, indifference can set in - if you're not going to tell me, then I don't want to know.
Who am I kidding? I do want to know. And I'll give this another spin to try and work things out.
