Upstream Color is a gorgeous movie-the play of sunlight in the visuals is exquisite-but its images of intestinal parasites are, well, off-putting.

Blending languorous visual sensuality with a driving sense of paranoid urgency, this metaphorical mix of skin-crawling body horror and Lynchian mystery boasts a compelling dream logic that offsets its huge potential for being pretentious studenty twaddle.

What the movie points to is worth following until you're left with an enormous map that you spend the rest of the drive trying to refold.

Disconcerting and unrealistic, malevolent and organic, emotional and bleak, Upstream Color is undoubtedly an experience that challenges those who call themselves cinephiles but rewards those who know that history exists as long as one forgets about it...