Upstream Color Information

Upstream Color is a film written, directed, and produced by Shane Carruth. The film is the second feature directed by Carruth, best known for his 2004 debut Primer. Upstream Color stars Carruth, Amy Seimetz, Andrew Sensenig, and Thiago Martins.

Upstream Color is about two people whose lives and behaviors are affected by a complex parasite"?without knowing it"?that has a three-stage life cycle in which it passes from humans to pigs to orchids. "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."

Plot

Kris (Amy Seimetz), a graphics production designer, is unknowingly drugged by a thief (Thiago Martins) in a club. The drug induces a highly suggestive mental state, which the thief then exploits. He uses an elaborate set of distractions, such as getting her to create a paper chain where each link features a handwritten page copied from Henry David Thoreau's novel Walden, in order to disguise the fact that he has convinced her to turn her home equity into cash and hand it over to him in her compromised state. Part of the drug used on Kris contains a live nematode, harvested from blue-tinged orchid leaves, that subsequently infects her system. She awakes to find the nematode, grown to a considerable length, visibly crawling under her skin, which she attempts to remove using a kitchen knife.

Later, a pig farmer and avid field recorder (known as the Sampler) lures Kris to his farm using infrasonics, which attract the worms. The Sampler sets up a transfusion through which the worms leave Kris and enter the pig. Kris then awakens in an abandoned SUV on the freeway with no memory of what happened. Upon arriving at her house she notices blood on her sheets and food from her food binge scattered around the floor. After cleaning up, she heads to her job, where she is promptly fired for being absent for several days without notice. A trip to the grocery store reveals to Kris that her life's savings are now missing.

She meets a man named Jeff (Shane Carruth) on a train and unknowingly connects with him on a metaphysical level. Kris and Jeff meet several times before finally spending the night with each other. The two of them soon realize that they both had similar experiences; Jeff lost his job as a broker due to shifting company funds around to cover for money stolen from him and attributes the incident to a psychotic break. The two of them start feeling each other's physical pain and emotions as well. Kris feels that she is pregnant, but upon consultation with a doctor, is diagnosed with having had endometrial cancer that has rendered her infertile and she is told she is unable to conceive. Nevertheless, the two continue their relationship, until the two of them start to remember each other's personal histories as their own.

The Sampler finds that the pig containing Kris' worm has given birth to piglets. He separates the hog and sow, then throws the piglets into a burlap sack and tosses them into a river. This event causes Jeff to simultaneously fight one of his employers while Kris searches frantically for "them" out of grief. The two, in their panicked state, travel to Kris' place, where they gather supplies and make camp in her bathroom's tub. The sack of piglets is seen rotting away, eventually a blue liquid bursts from the piglets' open wounds and fills the surrounding waters, from which orchids have emerged. The orchids eventually turn blue and are collected by farmers, who sell the plants within the aforementioned thief's residential area.

Kris and Jeff start becoming sensitive to sound and discover that Kris has been mumbling the text of Walden for some time now " the moment the two start to piece together what happened to them both. Subconsciously, Kris and Jeff come to remember sounds associated with the pig farm, as the Sampler was known for playing his sound compositions around the pigs. They arrive at his farm and Kris shoots him. Kris and Jeff also find a box with written records showing others who have had the worm injected into their bodies and summon them to the farm by sending them copies of Walden. The farm is thereafter remodeled and the pigs are better cared for; as a result, no more pigs are drowned, the orchids in the river no longer turn blue and the thief is deprived of the nematodes for his toxin.

Cast

• Amy Seimetz as Kris
• Shane Carruth as Jeff
• Andrew Sensenig as Sampler
• Thiago Martins as Thief
• Kathy Carruth as Orchid Mother
• Meredith Burke as Orchid Daughter
• Andreon Watson as Peter
• Ashton Miramontes as Lucas
• Myles McGee as Monty
• Frank Mosley as Husband
• Carolyn King as Wife
• Kerry McCormick as OBGYN
• Marco Antonio Rodriguez as MRI Tech
• Brina Palencia as Woman in Club
• Lynn Blackburn as HR Manager
• John Walpole as Bank Investigator

Production

In October 2011, it was revealed that Upstream Color would be Carruth's second feature, taking precedence over his science fiction film A Topiary. It was announced that Upstream Color was in the process of casting in Dallas, Texas, in preparation for a forty-day shoot, set to begin in early November 2011 and end in late January 2012.

Carruth, an interviewer noted, "served as director, writer, producer, actor, cinematographer, editor, composer, casting director, production designer and sound designer."

Release

The film premiered January 21, 2013 at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, followed by a theatrical release in the United States on April 5, 2013, self-distributed by Carruth. Carruth explained, "Everything about the choice to do the distribution is about contextualizing" the movie.

The film was shown at South by Southwest on March 8, 2013.

Themes and images

• The music of sounds - Several characters, including Jeff and Kris as well as the Sampler, focus on the music of wind and rain, or water pouring from a faucet, or from rocks falling; or of a sewing machine and other machinery; or of pigs communicating to each other in satisfied grunts.
• The outreached hand - Several characters walk with the camera focused on an outreached hand, which might stroke a machine or gesture toward a group of pigs.
• Breaking Cycles - In April 2013, i09.com asked Director Shane Carruth if the film's point regarded a return to nature. Carruth replied that the film explored breaking cycles:

"It's more about what those pigs are now embodying. I mean, there is a break of the cycle. These people that have been affected by this are now taking back ownership of the thing that they're connected to...I don't believe that narrative works when it's trying to teach a lesson, or speak a factual truth. What it's good for is, an exploration of something that's commonplace and universal "? maybe that's where the truth comes from."

Regarding the role of The Sampler, Carruth told i09, "So the idea that they would find this pig sampler, or this pig-farmer/sampler character, to be the culprit for all of their problems "? when, in reality, we of the audience see [that], of the three people continuing this life cycle, the thief is definitely malicious, the orchid harvesters are definitely benign. It's the sampler who is interesting, but not necessarily doing anything wrong. He is an observer. You can make a case for whether or not he's culpable, in being able to benefit from the observation..." Regarding the peace experienced by Kris at the end of the film, Carruth told i09, "By that time, we know that she can't have children. So whatever it is that she is peaceful with there [in the pig farm] is not going to return the affection she might have for it. It is always going to be that broken state of things, regardless of what that moment is like right then."

Reception

Upstream Color has received wide critical acclaim. After its premiere, Keith Kimbell wrote "most critics couldn't stop talking about it." Mark Olsen, for the Los Angeles Times, wrote, "For a time, Upstream Color was trending higher on Twitter than Sundance itself." According to Rotten Tomatoes, 86% of critics have given the film positive reviews, based on 111 reviews.

Sam Adams of the The A.V. Club gave the movie an "A" and wrote, "having the movie wash over me was one of the most transcendent experiences of my moviegoing life." Adams wrote, "It's utterly perplexing, and heart-stoppingly beautiful, quite literally overwhelming", comparing parts of the movie to The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick. In her review for The New York Times Manohla Dargis also notices Malick's deep imprint for Carruth, stating that the influence is "evident in Mr. Carruth's emphasis on the natural world; his use of "Walden"; the hushed voices and many images, including some time-lapse photography of a dead pig decaying underwater, which registers as the catastrophic inverse of the time-lapse sequence of a seed sprouting underground in "Days of Heaven"", adding that "Mr. Malick's influence also extends to shots of Kris and Jeff walking, whispering and touching that are not moored in a specific time but could be from the past, present or future. In these Malick Moments, time becomes as circular as the rising and setting of the sun."

Olsen of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "With its densely layered, thematically rich storytelling, Upstream Color is in part about the mutual psychosis that can be an essential part of romance, the agreement of a shared madness. It's intense and hypnotically powerful, and a more intimate and moving film than Primer. Color is somehow at once emotionally direct, while narratively abstract." A reviewer who enthused about the score wrote that he "found the film itself to be a messy, story-less, meandering abstract drug trip, but I admire the filmmaker and performances." The Guardian said that the film "contains striking microscopic imagery, cute pigs and alarmingly aggressive foley work. It's meticulous, methodical and educated " but also extreme, and extremely pretentious."

Writing for Music Box Theatre 2013 Spring Caledar film critic Mike D'Angelo concludes that "while Upstream Color has a fair amount of (purely functional) dialogue, it's essentially a silent film, obsessed not just with color but with texture and movement and rhythm." He also adds that the "film is a study of damaged people in which both the damage and the method of recovery has been made productively strange, allowing Carruth to reclaim some potent ideas that have become clichés". D'Angelo further states that the film is "a dazzling exercise in pure form, with a cinematic syntax that's confident and exacting yet still feels wildly spontaneous"?part Kubrick, part Malick", concluding that the "most exciting aspect of Carruth's movies, though, in the end, may be the immense respect they afford the viewer. Not only does he refuse to spoon-feed, in the tiresome manner of most Hollywood fare (and even a sizable percentage of indie films), but he continually credits you with the intelligence to infer cause from effect, presenting you with B and trusting that you'll work out A, which remains firmly offscreen, on your own."

The Hollywood Reporter declared that "Carruth's is a cinema of impressions and technique, not overt meaning" and gave a positive review: "The experience of watching the film...is highly visceral and sensuous; the images possess a crystalline clarity that is exquisite, and they're dispersed in rapid rhythmic waves in a way that's especially mesmerizing during this first section." In the second third of the film, after Kris and Jeff meet, the film "veers in the direction of romance in which two people who have presumably been genetically re-engineered attempt to redefine themselves and see what kind of connection they can make with someone else and what that might mean, if anything. They both remember and don't remember things from the past and sometimes argue over whose memory is whose."

The Salt Lake Tribune reviewer wrote that the "head-scratching science-fiction drama, about people finding themselves connected to each other and a parasite's life cycle, is beautiful to watch and contemplate." Reviewer Christopher Kelly, who was among other reviewers reminded of The Tree of Life, described it as "a puzzlebox narrative involving (among other very strange things) worms that are harvested for psychotropic drugs; a pig farmer who composes music inspired by the emotional anguish of others; and a group of people who have been kidnapped and bilked out of thousands of dollars. All of this unfolds in free-associative fashion, with one scene barely seeming to connect to the next." He said that the movie "floats gorgeously from one passage to the next, building a mounting sense of anxiety and melancholy at each mysterious step along the way."

Similarly, The Miami Herald called it "a puzzle that may be impossible to solve," saying that Carruth's "mesmerizing use of imagery"?of textures and sounds, of crisp lighting and radiant natural beauty"?has a haunting, lyrical quality reminiscent of Terrence Malick... But he also injects some moments that are so horrific and squirm-inducing, they're downright Cronenbergian. Although its title suggests a sense of direction, Upstream Color defiantly eschews a traditionally linear narrative format; it moves ahead in time but in an elliptical, hypnotic way. And Carruth's rhythmic style of editing draws you in and keeps you hooked even when it may not be entirely clear what you're watching. He's technically meticulous but the results are dreamlike."

The Film School Rejects reviewer gave an A- grade; he praised the film's "ambitiously big and brave themes" and the "finely effective score."

Music

The soundtrack for the film features music composed by Carruth. It has been described by one reviewer as "a moving, symphonic and emotional score."

Honors

At the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, Upstream Color received the Special Jury Award for Sound Design, which was shared by Carruth, Johnny Marshall, and Pete Horner.