I've written before about Carruth's first film, Primer, and about it's intricate, time-paradox laden plot.
A few weeks back we finally got around to watching his second film, "Upstream Color":
Because I'd watched "Primer" a few times, I figured I'd need to pay close attention to this longer and more ambitious effort. It's budget of reportedly $50k was seven times(!!) the budget for Primer, so let's see what he can do with a little cash I said to myself.
The first ten or fifteen minutes has no dialogue, which is cool in its own right, but forces viewers to really commit if you really want to get anything from the movie.
It starts out with a guy harvesting grubs from the soil of what look like blue orchids, and then boiling their bodies, or steeping them, and focusing on that liquid. A couple of kids get some and drink it, and start doing some kind of tai chi---basically showing them whacked out on a psychedelic. But the grub-steeping-drug-making guy doesn't care about them---they're just a minor detail to show the power of this drug.
The guy then takes either the liquid or an entire grub to a club, picks a girl, and forces it on her. She passes out as he's like, "No, she's okay, I'm juts taking her home." As a viewer you start to fear the worst, but to say it gets strange would be an understatement.
I'm going to go into a brief (LESS BRIEF THAN DESIRED) rundown of the plot, because you can't really describe what the movie's about without totally doing a disservice to the story like the Netflix summary. So, SPOILERS follow, be warned.
Okay: the drugged girl comes to with the dude in her place and she is totally under a spell where he can control her. He has her get dressed up and head to the bank, cashing in all of her savings, her mortgage, all of her credit card checks, doing something bad at her work, and collects all the money. It's a bizarrely silent opening, when some of the first words in the film is the girl returning to her car from one bank trip and relaying the entire conversation she had with the bank manager---doing both her lines and his---in deadpan to the weird rip-off-nefarious-drugger-dude in the back seat.
She comes to abruptly in her house, still dazed, now alone, gets in her car and drives to what appears to be a pig farm. Strange sound effects have been drawing her. A trailer in the middle of the pig farm has been outfitted for surgical purposes, and after collapsing on the dirt, a super weirdo guy gets her prepped and starts operating on her, connecting her to a pig---some kind of umbilical cord connects her ankle to a pig's navel.
We're maybe 25 minutes into the movie and there has been virtually no real dialogue.
She really comes to at her house, soon realizes she's been fired and has no money, and can't explain why she has weird cuts and sores all over her body (and ankle). Next we see her with short hair and must conclude that some time has elapsed. She still hasn't returned to a sense of normalcy, what with the amnesia and all.
A different weirdo (Carruth) starts macking on her on the light rail---he's drawn to her. She reluctantly starts to see him, and it turns out they have the same scar on their ankles.
Their awkward situations are interspersed with the weird pig-farming-amateur-surgeon guy off doing his real job, collecting sound effects for the film industry. All the while through the movie the score has been ethereal and nuts, mostly just the realization of this character's work. He'll pull over in his dusty murderer's truck to record the sound of rocks rolling down a metal grate or whatever.
Then it starts to get really weird.
It turns out that the surgeries seem to connect the souls of these victims to their linked pigs, and sometimes the human characters start to have visions or feelings of what their pigs are doing or going through. Two pigs seem to be inseparable, and this alarms the farmer/surgeon because he knows that two of his "patients" are with each other.
The human couple start to argue because their memories start to blend, and they can't agree to whom a specific memory has happened. The female pig ends up pregnant and the farmer/surgeon snatches up all the piglets; the lady cowers in the bathroom, sobbing, with no understanding why she's encountering these feelings.
Before the randomness of it all leads to them finding other "patients" and eventually finding and ending the pig farmer, a sequence that leads to the film's name, Upstream Color, occurs:
The farmer takes the piglets from the lady-pig-avatar, puts them in a sack, and throws them into a river to drown. Eventually the sack settles somewhere, and a time-lapse-y scene of the piglets decomposing happens (up close and not as heart-wrenching as it sounds), and some of the gore released into the river is a blue liquid. We viewers see this blue liquid flow downstream and turn the orchids growing on the river's edge from white to blue.
The Netflix summary says something like: A couple tries to rebuild their shattered lives after being drugged by a compound derived from plants.
Um...sure? Here's my updated summary: A psychic connection between select people and pigs is exploited to make a drug that turns new victims into controllable zombies who unwittingly give away all of their assets.
The official website talks about parasites... Maybe I saw that?
Anyway: ORIGINALITY KICKS ASS! MATH IN THE HOUSE!
Is this weird and high concept, or weirdness for its own sake?
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