Upstream Color poster Shane Carruth, writer/director/star of Upstream Color

Upstream Color: What Even

What factually happened in this movie

We see some kids drinking worm water and then synchronizing their body movements, which suggests that the worm water does something psychic

The lady is rendered suggestible via worm mugging and then the Thief takes all her money. I’m sure this is top-shelf hypnokink content for somebody

He can’t let her sleep, because sleeping will trigger the next phase of the worm’s life cycle?

He leaves, she sleeps, she can feel the worm growing enormous inside of her

Then either coincidentally or in his daily sweep for people who’ve been worm infected, the scientist finds her and saves her life by pulling out a real real long worm. He puts it into a pig for unclear reasons.

Her life is ~ruined.

The scientist (has psychic powers?) and remotely monitors his worm-saved people through their still-wormed pigs (who seem to be doing fine? Did he actually need to remove the worm to save her life?)

I found this part quite cool. I figured we were now gearing up for an Avengers Coming Together bit in which the scientist unites all of these worm victims and they hunt down the thief, and/or fight the sinister international cabal that rules the world with worm powers, or…something.

Then that doesn’t happen; we see some relationship tumult, and the walden pond revelations are kind of overexplained and unnecessary. Lady and new bf track down the scientist and kill him, for unclear reasons after he saved her life.

…does having a worm grant you psychic powers, and did the removal of the worm actually amputate this process? Perhaps this is what we were seeing with the synchronized children in the beginning. Perhaps this is how the scientist is remotely monitoring people. Is the scientist using his Worm Summons to psychically castrate people?

But it sure did seem like the lady was suffering for having a worm in her; the sense I got in that scene was definitely “he’s being caring and compassionate about this and saving her life”. We see him expressing affection to animals and to her. I don’t think the movie is trying to tell us he’s dr. lobotomy.

Welp, I don’t know what that story was communicating. Vague inspiration for a dnd game about people who get psychic powers as a byproduct of a psychic mugging. I would have liked to see the scientist be a more clearly nice guy, or more clearly a bad guy; I feel this movie didn’t come across as a story exactly but more a recounting of things that happened.