--Ezra's recording, Color Out of Space
H.P. Lovecraft's story The Colour Out of Space is wonderfully adapted in a 2019 film starring Nicolas Cage of all people. Setting up its human characters within the first 20 minutes before the titular color arrives, some of them to an unusually effective extent, Color Out of Space is a sometimes excellent cosmic horror movie with the visual flair this exact story calls for. In a flash of purple, a strange object falls to Earth outside of a family residence, and yet Nathan Gardner has trouble recalling what color the impact projected. A distinctively Lovecraftian tale ensues despite the absence of enormous beasts. The city of Arkham--yes, this is actually what inspired the name of Arkham Asylum in the Batman mythos, as Lovecraftian horror can often involve a descent into insanity of a kind--is also mentioned repeatedly, a part of Lovecraft lore with an extreme impact on later storytelling far outside of cosmic horror, and it is fitting that this name would be acknowledged in recent cinema for its fictional roots.
Production Values
Opening with a unique approach to introductory credits, Color Out of Space displays its visual excellence very early on. These credits appear and shift into the foreground or seem attached to trees as the camera rotates. Not long after, there is a shot of the inside of a well that turns out to be showing the reflection in the water rather than showing the characters looking below from underneath them. Before the 20 minute mark, the first of the color from outer space is seen in an explosion of purple. The meteorite and its exotic color are later portrayed as a mixture or rapid changing of colors like purple and blue. Cosmic horror is severely misunderstood by people who think it shows things that are logically impossible or that humans cannot understand, and there is of course no such thing as a color from an object outside of the planet that would not ultimately be a color we can find in our lives or a mixture of familiar colors. In spite of this, the foreign nature of the color is triumphantly conveyed. The wildness of the ending only highlights the color and its powers (though only objects can have colors, so the color seems to be emanating from an energy or even an alien consciousness) all the more.
The acting and characterization is, while secondary to atmosphere, also handled very well as a whole. In the right role, Nicolas Cage can do far more than radiate unintentional humor or dramatically panic as he does in some of his most famous scenes. His voice changes as the film progresses, starting with a more dramatic, lifelike vocal tone that lapses into one of his more unusual but still iconic ones as the Lovecraftian force exerts its influence on him. He switches back and forth within the same scene on occasion. Without being his best or most adventurous or bold role, Nathan Gardner is still one he is perfectly at home in, as the cosmic horror circumstances give Cage a new context for some of his signature style. It would still have been better for the sake of tonal consistency to not have him lean as much into his almost self-parody levels of acting in some moments when the extraterrestrial substance alters his mind. Besides Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Elliot Knight (from the DC show Titans), and other cast members do their part with the situational humor, gravitas, or confusion that each scene calls for. Madeleine Arthur and Elliot Knight in particular have to carry certain scenes, including their meeting in the opening, that are of great significance to the plot, which they actually do.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
A young girl attempts a Wiccan ritual to grant several of her desires, such as the removal of her mother's cancer, which incidentally leads to her meeting a boy surveying the groundwater of the general area for a hydroelectric company. That very night, a bizarre meteorite falls to the ground in a blaze of purple. The youngest son of the family living on the property enters a catatonic state for a time, and soon, almost every family member begins experiencing unusual perceptions or situations. The mother cuts off two of her fingers as she zones out. The daughter hears garbled speech when she answers her phone. The older of the two sons finds animals that he already fed wandering about as if they have not eaten. A small creature also comes forth from with an insectoid body of purple, seen only by the child who went catatonic when the object first landed. The groundwater surveyor finds evidence of contaminated water, encouraging people not to drink from it.
Intellectual Content
The events of the film do very much reflect the Lovecraftian idea that the physical world and the beings that inhabit it are ultimately quite hostile or indifferent to humans, except when it suits them to toy with people as a means to their alien ends. In contrast with a popular misconception of Lovecraftian or general cosmic horror, the laws of logic are true by inherent necessity, but the scientific correlations of ordinary life are not. Color Out of Space indirectly touches upon the former in that it only shows logically possible but bizarre things, with logical impossibilities being impossible even in fiction, and thus they cannot be portrayed even when people intend to because they cannot avoid logical axioms. The movie addresses the latter much more directly, depicting a terrible spiral into what is implied to be a terraforming of sorts where the alien "color" or the potentially conscious being behind it alters both the laws of physics and the mental perceptions of the Gardner family. The "final boy" of the story recognizes the in-narrative non-universal nature of Earth's scientific laws in the final scene, and not only does his survival mean he replaced a character that could have filled the final girl trope, but he is also a black person, someone Lovecraft himself would have despised or feared. There is a great double irony in how this film inverts a classic horror role and honors the cosmic horror of Lovecraft while disregarding his renowned racism against black people.
Conclusion
Another cinematic accomplishment for Nicolas Cage, an actor with one of the most wild filmographies, Color Out of Space succeeds in adapting its source material yet again. It could have sometimes actually benefitted from a less over the top performance by Cage, but even when he embraces a style reminiscent of some of his other films, he is never a bad fit for the story and for this particular adaptation of it. As a slow burn cosmic horror narrative, the movie manages to emphasize both the otherworldly glow and invasive corruption of the meteorite that brings doom with it, all without showing the breakdown of a family quite as well as other horror films like The VVitch or Hereditary. It also does not feature any of the more culturally recognizable Lovecraftian entities like Cthulhu, which is not a flaw, just something people craving a more conventional Lovecraft story might not prefer. For a movie adapting a story that could be quite difficult to visually tackle, this is generally a solid offering that incorporates all of the standard subgenre trappings like distortion of perception, an extradimensional or extraterrestrial being, and a quiet start that gives way to pandemonium.
Content:
1. Violence: A woman slices two of her fingers off. The hand is shown with blood. Mutated alpacas are shot onscreen, a scene that also shows eruptions of blood, as is a transformed human.
2. Profanity: "Fuck," "damn," and "bitch" are used.
3. Sexuality: A man and woman are briefly shown engaging in clothed, passionate sexual interaction.
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