Shane Carruth’s debut film Primer achieved Internet notoriety by spawning a variety of charts and diagrams to describe the events of the film. They were of such complexity as to surpass those created for Christopher Nolan’s Inception. Even with the aid of these charts, most viewers still walked away without really understanding what happened in the movie. Upstream Color is the same director’s second feature and like its predecessor, it is not an easy film to understand.

Fortunately Upstream Color isn’t quite as impenetrable a film. The trick is, in my opinion, to take the events at face value. This isn’t a film that you think through, as Primer indisputably was, so much as a film to feel through. A man and a woman feels an inexplicable connection to each other, so strong that both of them know that being together is inevitable, yet so sudden and mysterious that it weirds them out. As the same time, a parallel story is told about the life cycle of a parasite which can induce a hypnotic state in the humans it infects along with the various people who are aware of its existence and exploit it.

All this is told in a starkly minimalistic style that eschews exposition. Instead, you have brief snatches of dialogues or wordless sequences when information is conveyed in the shrug of a shoulder or a brush of a hand. Many reviewers have commented how reminiscent this style is of the work of Terrence Malick. Indeed this film reminded me strongly of The Tree of Life. Given that I absolutely adore that film, it’s no surprise that this one won me over, even if it left me somewhat lost at times.

I’m not quite convinced that the plot is iron-clad, the way that Primer, for all its Möbius strip-like convolutions, is supposed to be bullet-proof. The role of the pig farmer, for example, seems ambiguous to me. It isn’t obvious that he knows the thief, yet he must know someone one out there must be infecting people with the parasites. Yet there’s no denying that the film has a powerful, emotive effect if you allow yourself to be engrossed in its flow. The crystal clear images are mysterious and utterly captivating. Most of all, the film is interesting and intriguing in a way that only truly original works of art can be.

Carruth not only wrote and directed the film, he also acts in it and wrote its score. If nothing else, this surely makes him auteur of the year. With only two films under his belt, and both of them indie productions with modest budgets, he still has plenty of room to grow. I look forward to watching more films from this imaginative and brilliant creator.