Director: Shane Carruth
Talent: Amy Seimetz, Shane Carruth, Thiago Martins, Andrew Sensenig
Release Date: 30th August 2013
Shane Carruth emerged as a singular filmmaking talent with 2004’s Primer, a dense time-travel feature which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in, and which cost a remarkable $7,000 to make. Almost a decade later, he has returned with his second, Upstream Colour, developed entirely outside of the conventional studio system (‘There isn’t a molecule of Hollywood that’s touched this.’): a singular vision which echoes thematically and methodically the work of the 19th century agrarian Henry David Thoreau, a copy of whose Walden looms ominously in the narrative.
The film skirts from body-horror to field recording to awkward romance to sparse Malickian reflectiveness with the formal assuredness that characterised Primer‘s more labyrinthine, if thematically simpler, storytelling. Carruth allows everything to unfold in a similarly obtuse manner which will no doubt reward repeat viewings, but after an unambiguous final sequence, the viewer is here left with a definite sense of what has taken place, rather than the bewilderment familiar from nine years ago. That said, while Primer‘s shifting narrative structure reflected on a formal level the concerns of its time-travel narrative, and the emergent misgivings of its protagonists regarding paradoxes and the multiplicity of timelines, Upstream Colour can at times feel grasping or bathetic, like a slighter version of Terrence Malick, whose work can already tend towards the maudlin. It’s when Carruth has to inject emotional resonance that the film falters; the final-reel’s pregnant silences tend not to ring true when we’ve only come to know their subjects through dewy, soft-focus montage and snatches of dialogue. As the central metaphors of the narrative become uncannily literal, and Carruth’s associative editing more and more didactic, the film’s affect rests on whether the viewer is willing to surrender the ambiguity heretofore fostered on a formal level for a tangible and unusually sentimental recapitulation.
