willywilly

It's not every day you get to puzzle out a serious experiment in cinematic narrative, so here's your chance. Crimes are committed using some sort of telepathising mind-worm and two victims get together to solve, revenge and repair what was done to them. There's more to it than that but it's not immediately apparent what. It's a sci-fi concept that eschews exposition and, for much of its length, dialogue.

Figuring out what's going on is itself a theme of the story, and it's what the characters are doing too, so it is metafictional in that way. And it's less likely this fact than the repeated use of the same ambient soundtrack material (produced by director Shane Carruth who also shoots the parts he's not acting in) that lends the film a soporific quality. Upstream Color intrigues, but to a greater degree than it entertains.

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Stenders is a heroic filmmaker. He's doing R&D for the rest of us timid, eager to please, pussy type auteurs. Kriv is here not only to ask 'what if' but to do the work and find out. Necessity is the mother of invention and the necessities of his budgetary constraints mean we now know how a film that is (what looks like) one take, with largely improvising actors, can work. While good, this isn't the greatest film ever made, but Stenders is mining promising territory with his experiments and I'm waiting for him to strike gold with the right components applied to the right idea, and a bit of luck. I'd like to see him use his freedom to try bolder subject matter. The family secret in this film felt a little too familiar in today's media-sphere. Still, I can't think of another Australian filmmaker still working in Australia as worth keeping an eye on as Stenders, except maybe the guys who made Black Water.