10 Complex Movies You Really Weren't Prepared For

Those familiar with Shane Carruth's mind-blowingly dense and confusing work of sci-fi cinema, Primer, might have known to expect the unexpected when they sat down to this. For anyone else, though, Upstream Color - with its plot that outright defies any real explanation - must have felt like an impenetrable nightmare.

In its most basic form, then, the "story" driving Upstream Color concerns the exploits of a man who forces a woman to eat a strange organism, leaving her open to exploitation and mind suggestion. She wakes up, her life gone, and - as she meets a strange man - we begin to realise that we're watching a group of humans who are somehow connected via the life cycle of this complex parasite. Probably.

All that, of course, does nothing to outline the film, a highly experimental work in nature, what with its Terrence Malick-like visuals, and structureless structure.

Anyone who went into this thinking they'd be able to figure it out in a single sitting would have been sorely mistaken. In many ways, Upstream Color is more labyrinthian than Primer and that, reader, is really saying something.