Review of Color Out of Space (2020) by Bertaut1 — 24 Jan 2020

A solid adaptation, albeit with a bit too much alpaca-based comedy.

Written and directed by Richard Stanley (his first film in 25 years), Colour Out of Space is a modernised adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's 1927 short story, and takes a good stab at depicting one of Lovecraft's most oblique entities. Mixing humour and body horror (perhaps weighed a little too much towards humour), the film gives Nicolas Cage another opportunity to go full-Cage after he recently cut loose in Mom and Dad (2017) and Mandy (2018). And boy does he lean into it – this is the most ludicrous, histrionic, and borderline farcical performance since Vampire's Kiss (1989).

Just outside the city of Arkham, MA (the fictitious setting of many Lovecraftian stories), Nathan Gardner (Cage), his wife Theresa (Joely Richardson), and their children Benny (Brendan Meyer), Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), and Jack (Julian Hilliard) have moved into Nathan's deceased father's property, with Nathan embracing rural life by raising alpacas. On an otherwise normal night, the sky fills with pulsating light and a meteorite crashes onto the Gardners' land, and as time passes, amidst a series of ever-more bizarre events, the family members soon begin to show signs of unnatural change.

Where Stanley is perhaps most successful in adapting the original is in terms of how he depicts the entity itself, or rather, how he doesn't. In the original story, the entity is described only by analogy, and even then, only in relation to colour. With this in mind, Stanley wisely keeps everything as vague as possible – vibrant, modulating pulses of light that seem to be emanating from somewhere just outside the frame, vaguely-defined spatial distortions, colour manipulations with no obvious source.

Important here is the actual colour itself. Instead of attempting to create an indescribable colour (in the story the colour is beyond the visible spectrum), director of photography Steve Annis avoids depicting any one stable colour – every time we see the effects of the meteorite, the hue is in a state of flux, so although we can say the colours are recognisable, they are never identifiable as a specific colour, which was a smart choice on his part.

As we get into the third act, the film abandons all sense of restraint as the body horror which has threatened to break through from the earliest moments is finally unleashed, foregrounding the exceptional work of special effects supervisor/creature designer Dan Martin. These scenes are heavily indebted to Chris Walas's work on David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986) and Rob Bottin's work on John Carpenter's The Thing (1982), including a direct visual quote of one of its most famous dog-related moments. Some of the more grotesque human-related effects also reminded me a little of Screaming Mad George's work on Society (1989).

It's also in the last act where Cage is turned loose, and that's not entirely a good thing. Full-Cage has been seen in films such as Vampire's Kiss, Face/Off, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, Mom and Dad, and Mandy, but each performance has felt fairly organic, never becoming self-conscious. In Colour, however, Cage crosses into self-parody, with his performance having as much to do with people's preconceived notions of a Nicolas Cage performance as it does with finding the character; oftentimes, it feels less like he's trying to convey the character's emotions, and more like he's winking at the audience.

Which might be entertaining and all, but which doesn't serve the film especially well. For all its insanity, this is a relatively serious movie, but Cage's performance is so manic, that it affects everything around it. For example, after a meltdown about his alpacas ("don't you know how expensive those alpacas were"), which just about fits in what we know of the character, as Nathan is walking away, he stops, turns, pauses, shouts "ALPACAS", pauses again, and then walks away. Undoubtedly funny. But does self-reflexive humour by the leading man help tell the story or even create the right tone? No, not in the slightest.

The other characters all have a kind of internal logic to their crumbling sanity; the meteorite affects each of them differently, with their minds disintegrating in different, but consistent ways. With Cage, however, Stanley seems unwilling, or unable, to establish the parameters by which Nathan's mind is disintegrating, seemingly going for laughs rather than something more cogent.

This issue notwithstanding, I enjoyed Colour Out of Space a great deal. Stanley's return to the director's chair is to be admired for its restraint and how faithful it remains to the very tricky Lovecraftian original. The body-horror in the film's will appeal to fans of the grotesque, whilst others will take pleasure from Cage's insanity, as narratively unjustified as it is. The film is ridiculous on many levels, but it's extremely well realised and well made.