Link: Upstream Color

Summary: After a mysterious drug is used to make people highly suggestible in a scheme to wipe out their bank accounts, two recovering victims realize the drug also gave them strange psychic powers.  Together they try to cope with their strange new powers.

Thoughts: I highly enjoyed writer/director Shane Carruth’s previous film, Primer, which is what led me to check this film out.  I enjoyed the first half.  Though it’s rather mysterious what’s going on, it begins to make sense when the woman we’ve been watching realizes she’s a victim of a money-stealing scheme.  The rest of the film was boring.  Things about a sound man making recordings, psychic pigs, and passages of Walden (which I loathe).  There are people who may say, “You have to be smart and figure it out!” or “You don’t have to understand it all; it’s all about the feelings!  Art!”  I have no doubt Carruth had something specific in mind that he was trying to convey without condescending to the audience, but this isn’t the way to do it.  This is not being clever or artistic or coy; this is just storytelling laziness.  Could you at least try to help me understand?  Or do you think I’m too stupid?