Shane Carruth’s Primer is a great bit of science fiction. It takes a piece of hypothetical technology, a time machine, and explores the way its existence would affect the world in which we live. As famous as Primer has become for its twisty, nonlinear storytelling and the unique nature of its time machine, it is just as worthy for its moral exploration of time travel’s ethical consequences. Carruth is interested in the technical aspects of his story, but just as committed to the humans who live in the world of his technology. It is a fantastic film, and Carruth’s follow-up Upstream Color is its superior in just about every way. Where Primer explored the way power can transform people for good and ill, Upstream Color examines the way people heal from trauma and can find strength in each other. That it does so in a frequently dialogue-free story about mind control grubs, fraud, music and pigs is a testament to the power of science fiction as a genre and Shane Carruth as a filmmaker and storyteller.
Upstream Color follows a young woman named Kris (Amy Seimetz) who falls victim to a thief (Thiago Martins)Â with an unusual advantage over his peers; he has developed a strain of grubs into a potent form of mind control. He takes control of Kris and has her give him every financial asset she has, from the mortgage on her house to her collection of rare coins. When Kris wakes up, she finds her life ruined. As she tries to put her life together, she meets Jeff (Carruth), a fellow victim of the conman. They begin dating, and soon discover an unusual mental bond that causes them to remember each other’s memories as their own. This causes some friction, but they manage to stick it out. The bond itself is the result of an ally of the thief, the Sampler (Andrew Sensenig), who extracted the fully-grown grubs from Kris, Jeff and others and put them into pigs. Kris and Jeff’s pigs have grown close due to Kris and Jeff’s relationship, and the grubs in the pigs are interacting with each other. When Kris’ pig becomes pregnant with a litter of piglets, Kris initially believes she is pregnant. After the piglets are born, the Sampler takes them from their parents and drowns them. The piglets’ bodies decompose in the river, and the chemicals from their bodies mutate a group of flowers, which create the mind control chemical when fed to the grubs. Kris and Jeff feel their pigs’ shock and horror at losing their piglets. Jeff flies into a rage and attacks two men at his workplace, and Kris smashes a window and makes her way to Jeff’s workplace in a blackout. They reunite, and make it through the rest of the trauma by holing up in their bathtub with a survival kit and holding each other until the pain subsides.
As utterly bizarre as the above sounds in writing, on screen it is quite potent. Carruth trusts his audience to put together the story and so he tells most of Upstream Color‘s plot through images and editing. Kris and Jeff do not speak much, but their love and their bonds with their pigs ar conveyed through the way they react to the world and the people around them, the way they carry themselves, and they way they move. Carruth, like Nicolas Winding Refn, is extremely deliberate about what he puts on screen and when. Whether it is Kris’ disorientation when she ends up in Jeff’s workplace or Jeff’s inexplicable fury, Carruth conveys emotion through motion, expression and the transition from scene to scene. He introduces Kris and Jeff in the bathtub in a slow steadicam shot that gradually reveals where they are, what surrounds them and what they are perceiving. He follows it with the shot he used for the film’s poster and publicity, above – Kris and Jeff holding each other. They do not yet understand what is happening to them, and they have been hit with powerful, painful emotions, but they are facing them together, and hold on to each other through the worst. They give each other comfort and strength. It may sound strange and awkward written down, but Carruth’s filmmaking renders Upstream Color‘s bathroom sequence the most powerfully romantic scene of the year.
