Upstream Color Reviews
Top CriticIt presents us with a glimpse of the vastness of existence, of our inner nature, and of nature without that is as equally dreadful, enveloping, and terrifying as it is beautiful.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
"Upstream Color" is splendid, transcendent weirdness.
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| Original Score: A
Sci-fi might have been too familiar a word, for what may induce a kind of hallucinatory melancholy in its viewers.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Elliptical and utterly fascinating adventure in cinema, one that defies simple explanations, but worms its way into the brain.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Carruth may be something that the movies haven't yet seen, perhaps the first great realization of the democratization of filmmaking that digital technology and the Internet promised.
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| Original Score: 9/10
Upstream Color is a deliberate exercise in swooning obscurity. You either go with its considerable sensory powers or you scratch a groove on your head.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Being completely understood at first glance is not on creator Shane Carruth's agenda, but while this may sound upsetting, it turns out to be quite the opposite.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Visually and sonically hypnotic, it's an intensely sensory blend of internal monologue and unsettling mystery, draped over a thin skeleton of plot approached so obliquely that it seems almost inconsequential.
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| Original Score: 3/4
No one else today approaches the genre in quite this way; the only precedent I can think of is Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth.
While I feel compelled to see it again, I don't have high hopes that it will make any more sense.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Meanings are multiple, debatable and ultimately pointless. What really impresses about Upstream Color is Carruth's confident navigation of this fast river of ideas ...
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Here is a movie you haven't seen before. If you think you have, it's probably because you swallowed a white worm that turned you into a pod-person subject to total mind control and now you're having flashbacks.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This enigma-delivery system from a sharp mind has enthralling moments but becomes a bit enervating in its self-seriousness. By the end, the whole thing feels more academic than mind-bending.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
"Upstream Color" lacks both a clear point and, more crucially, a point of view.
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| Original Score: 2/4
What I discern here is the work of a unique visual stylist and collage artist who's creating obsessive-compulsive allegorical puzzles, whose underlying philosophy is deliberately unclear.
A deeply sincere, elliptical movie about being and nature, men and women, self and other, worms and pigs ...
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| Original Score: 4/5
A romance, a thriller, and a science-fiction drama, "Upstream Color" tantalizes viewers with an open-ended narrative about overcoming personal loss.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The effort is majestically single-minded, even if the overall vibe tips dangerously toward preciousness.
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| Original Score: 3/5
It's a bloodless movie, and its ideas aren't as tricky or complex as Carruth's arch, mannered approach might suggest.
The artistry on display is indisputable, and thrilling.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A vision as vast and as natural as it is reflexively cinematic and fiercely compassionate.
I've seen Upstream Color twice and liked it enormously while never being certain of anything.
A relatively straightforward story steeped in abstract concepts upon which Carruth hangs themes of love, hope, fear, fate, free will, memory, identity, creativity, spirituality, the control of nature and the nature of control like so many paper chains.
Upstream Color is a stimulating and hypnotic piece of experimental filmmaking.
A dramatically obscure, technically brilliant experiment in speculative fiction from Shane Carruth.
