Many months on, I still have little-to-no idea as to what I was actually watching. Shane Carruth pretty much epitomizes the independent filmmaker. In the long awaited follow-up to the mind-bending Primer, the writer/director/actor/composer created a Lynchian feverdream of the bizarre and the beautiful. It’s the kind of film that demands multiple viewings -a cinematic acid trip packed with jumps in time and space. Despite its deliberately impenetrable plot, it’s a visually dazzling and suprisingly visceral experience featuring one of the year’s most underrated performances from the brilliant Amy Seimetz. As fascinating as it is confusing, Upstream Color is – if nothing else – thoroughly unique.
Just when you thought the found footage genre was dead in the water, its final death rattle went and produced something actually worth watching. An off-beatly intelligent, occasionally very creepy little sci-fi movie, Europa Report follows a group of astronauts searching for intelligent life on Jupiter’s fourth largest moon – at which point everything inevitably goes completely wrong.
Though measured in build-up, it grows into an all out bat-shit insane crescendo that you’d begrudge in a lesser film, but here feels warranted. With some brilliant visual touches belying its minimal funding, Europa Report is an encouraging reflection of just how far low-budget cinema has come.
