I don’t hew to any set rules as to what makes a great film, but I do subscribe to one general proposition: that the greatest movies seek to unite audiences, seek to provide a communal vision that can be enjoyed almost irrespective of education or taste. This isn’t to say the ideal filmmaker aims to appease the uneducated and tasteless; just that the greatest films can and do operate on multiple levels–are simple and complex both at once.

Nor do I mean to suggest the ideal filmmaker is necessarily a populist like Griffith, Capra, or Spielberg (although I admire all three of those directors quite a bit). All I am saying is this: that movies, at their best, are a uniquely democratic art form (visual grammar being understood by pretty much everyone), and the greatest filmmakers–artists as disparate as Murnau, Dreyer, Welles, Ray, Ichikawa, Demy, Rosi, Altman, Leigh, etc.–reflect that democratic spirit by aiming more or less for the broad audience. If some in the audience don’t “get” their movies intellectually, they may get them emotionally or kinesthetically or on a simple narrative level. This formulation arguably leaves out some films I love (the more impenetrable works of Buñuel, Godard, or Lynch, say), but it is still the best, most useful litmus test I can conceive of.

It is also, of course, an increasingly unpopular litmus test, and no recent film exemplifies this shift better than Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, which debuts at the Bell Lightbox next weekend. The movie is already a critical favourite based on early screenings at Sundance and SXSW, and it is also, not coincidentally, just barely coherent. This isn’t my own personal assessment, it’s simply a statement of fact. Upstream Color is a puzzle film; there’s a plot, of sorts, but it has to be pieced together from Carruth’s elegantly fractured visual syntax: flashbacks, flashforwards, jump cuts, etc. It’s not hard to get the basic drift, but it’s literally impossible–even with multiple viewings–to fully connect the dots. (I’ve seen it twice, and the second viewing yielded no further clarity.) Unlike Carruth’s 2004 debut Primer, which could almost be made sense of if you cared to try, Upstream Color is so purposefully vague, so open to interpretation, that no two interpretations will ever match. For many critics and viewers, this is self-evidently a wonderful thing–a sign the movie is not just unconventional, but a true original. Me, I think Upstream Color worthwhile, but I also think it an artistic dead end. As handsome and accomplished as it is, it’s a closed off, navel-gazing work.

To back up for a moment, here is what I can say with relative surety about the content of Upstream Color: a young woman (Amy Seimetz) goes to a bar and is attacked by a young man. He forces her to swallow some sort of bioengineered, mind-controlling grub (it’s like a particularly potent tequila worm), then compels her to do bizarre tasks. The most bizarre: transcribing passages from Walden, then rolling the pages up and making chain-links from them. The least bizarre: getting her to sign over all her savings. After the young man gets his dough, he disappears, leaving the woman broke and alone with a head full of disturbing trace memories. Eventually, the woman encounters another young man (Carruth) on her commuter train who possesses similar memories, and the two fall in love while trying to solve the riddle of what happened to them. 

There’s much more of course–I haven’t even mentioned the mysterious sound-effects guy or the pig farm. And while it all more or less comes together narratively, what doesn’t come together is what it all means, man. It’s fairly obvious Carruth wants to say something about how disconnected we all are (thus the disconnected style) and how we need to take a cue from Thoreau and stop and smell the flowers and all that. (Specifically some really colourful flowers we see growing upstream at several points…) But the movie is essentially about whatever you want it to be about, which means it’s barely about anything at all. It’s less a movie than an elaborate Rorschach blot.

I don’t deny there’s value in films like this–they’re meditative, and the fragmentation techniques make for good synaptic exercise. But I can’t help being skeptical of the critical awe they invariably provoke. (A recent Time article asked of Upstream Color: “Did one of the best movies ever made just debut in Park City?”) First of all, cryptic puzzle films are nothing new–every era produces a couple, and they were particularly prevalent in the late ’60s and early ’70s: Petulia, Play it As it Lays, Images, etc. Secondly, they’re not that smart. What’s so brilliant about taking a run-of-the-mill story and scrambling it up? It’s the audience that has to do all the work, not the filmmakers. And in the case of Upstream Color, the basic scenario, once revealed, is totally silly if taken literally, and too didactic if taken allegorically. (The Thoreau recitations, specifically, are almost embarrassingly on-the-nose.)

But even if Upstream Color were as smart as it pretends, I would still be turned off by its style, which is the increasingly prevalent art-house style of obscurity for its own sake. The fragmentation techniques don’t come out of any necessity–they just flatter the “serious” filmgoer for sticking with it and function as a “keep-out” sign for everyone else. In his defense, Carruth is a former engineer, and it’s entirely possible he comes by his schematic approach honestly. It may, in fact, be the only way he knows how to work. But something essential is lost when a movie is only complex–when it completely forsakes the simple element, which is, of course, where emotion generally lies. Carruth is so wrapped up in narrative elision that he fails to grasp just how distancing it all is. Despite third-act intimations of emotional epiphany, we remain at a cool remove throughout, largely because we never get particularly invested in the two protagonists. How can we when we’re never permitted to get close to them? It would help if Carruth knew how to work with actors, but he can’t stage even a simple conversation without it looking like an acting class improv exercise. Seimetz is a strong enough actress to make at least a muted impression, but Carruth, despite his handsomeness, is pretty clearly a dud as an actor.

Every time a film like Upstream Color comes along, you hear the filmmakers talk about wanting to provide a “unique experience” or how they want to send each viewer on their own separate “journey.” But the way I see it, that’s what life is. Art is where we go to escape those separate journeys, to find common ground, either with our fellow audience members or with the artists themselves. In providing such a thoroughly subjective experience, Upstream Color prevents even the most cinematically astute viewers from connecting, from experiencing the great, momentary joy of dreaming common dreams.

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