Shane Carruth emerged as a singular filmmaking talent with 2004’s Primer, a jam-packed time-travel feature, which he wrote, directed, produced and starred in – a project that cost an astonishing $7,000 to make. After almost a decade later, he has returned with his second piece, Upstream Color, construed entirely outside of the conventional studio system (‘There isn’t a molecule of Hollywood that’s touched this.’): a particular 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 moves from body-horror to field recording to awkward romance to bare Malickian reflectiveness with the formal confidence that characterized Primer’s more labyrinthine, if stylistically simpler, storytelling. Carruth allows everything to unfold in a likewise obtuse manner which will no doubt reward repeat viewings, but after an unambiguous final sequence, the viewer is here left with a distinct sense of what has taken place, rather than the bewilderment familiar from nine years ago. That said, while Primer’s changing narrative structure reflected on a ceremonial level the concerns of its time-travel narrative, and the emergent misgivings of its protagonists regarding paradoxes and the multiplicity of timelines, Upstream Color can at times feel acquisitive, a slighter version of Terrence Malick, whose work can already tend towards the mawkish. 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 tid-bits of dialogue. As the fundamental 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 uncertainty heretofore fostered on a formal level for a substantial and unusually sentimental recapitulation.

Word by Oisín Murphy-Hall