This week in movies you missed: The director of cult flick Primer returns with an expressionist epic about the bond between human and … swine?

What You Missed

OK, that’s not exactly what Upstream Color is about. It’s a tough movie to summarize, though.

Amy Seimetz plays Kris, a professional who is abducted and fed a worm that places her in a suggestible hypnotic state. Her abductor cements his control by instructing her to do odd repetitive tasks, then makes her sign over the equity in her house.

Things get worse from there. Kris ends up in the care of a sound artist/avant-garde composer/pig farmer (Andrew Sensenig) who performs a procedure that gives her back control of her mind and body, but leaves her with a big hole in her memory.

As she rebuilds her life, Kris meets a young man (writer-director Shane Carruth) who appears to have had a similar experience. They become involved while trying to figure out what the hell happened. The audience joins them in this endeavor.

Margot Harrison is a consulting editor and film critic at Seven Days. Her film reviews appear every week in the paper and online. In 2024, she won the Jim Ridley Award for arts criticism from the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. Her book reviews have also appeared in the New York Times. She is a member of the Online Film Critics Society, with reviews on the Tomatometer, and the author of five novels, including YA thrillers Only She Came Back and We Made It All Up.