Upstream Color

Directed by Shane Carruth

(Not rated)

****

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Watching Upstream Color feels like being inside someone else’s dream, said Kenneth Turan inthe Los Angeles Times. Shane Carruth, whose film Primer won the 2004 Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, is a stubbornly enigmatic storyteller, but “he’s so good at it that he pins us to our seats even when we’re not exactly sure what’s going on.” Here, Carruth plays a man drawn to a woman for mysterious reasons—perhaps because each was previously forced by an identity thief to ingest a larva that contains a potent mind-control substance. “Given the extreme difficulty of playing a real person in the dream-like landscape of this film,” Amy Seimetz “gives a remarkable performance,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Carruth himself is “nothing special” as an actor, but as a writer, director, and cinematographer, he makes us believe in his sci-fi fable up to the point when we have time to reflect on its possible allegorical significance. You probably won’t be sure what Carruth is saying, and still you’ll want to watch the film again, said David Edelstein in New York magazine. “Some movies warrant a leap of faith.”