Movie Review : Color Out of Space (2019)
The Nicolas Cage renaissance has quietly been one of the most interesting pop culture storylines in recent years. Starting over with straight-to-video crap, Cage worked his way back up the food chain and low-key started turning heads again with his performance in Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy. Disgraced by one generation, Cage embraced the irony attached to his name and bounced back with weird, bombastic performances only he could come up with.
In Richard Stanley’s adaptation of H.P Lovecraft’s Color Out of Space, Cage’s tattered reputation is almost imperceptible. He’s just weird enough to be imperceptibly unlikable in a movie where everything’s fucking weird, inherently scary and off-putting.
Color Out of Space tells the story of Ward Phillips (Elliot Knight), a scientist tasked by the city of surveying the water near the city of Arkham for an eventual dam project. That’s where he meets the Gardner family, who recently left the city for a quieter life in the countryside. Unfortunately, their existence is thrown out of wack by a meteorite crashing on their property. It should’ve been the end of it, but that rock brought something vicious from the sky.
The million dollar question: what color is the titular color out of space? It’s difficult to say (which I believe was the point), an indistinguishable mix of purple and pink? The other million question regarding this H.P Lovecraft adaptation is: is it actually scary? Outside of deliberately lo-fi Re-Animator, the cosmic horror pioneer was never really treated to a successful adaptation. Color Out of Space can be a little overt at times, but it can also be genuinely unsettling.
But can a color be scary, right? If Junji Ito made spirals terrifying, I don’t see why a color couldn’t make you shit your pants. The scariest moments in Color Out of Space involve color. One of my favorite scenes is when the younger kid Jack (Julian Hilliard) is beckoned to the family well by the unknown invader. You’re expecting a boogeyman, but all he finds is a purple praying mantis. That shit has infiltrated EVERYTHING and corrupted reality.
That was fucking cool.
Color Out of Space becomes all-out crazy after an hour or so, but it is so devoid of stereotypical scares and monsters that it manages to remain oddly efficient. Since the outer space “thing” makes the father Nathan (Nicolas Cage) impatient and prone to violence, you expect him to turn into an ugly space monster, but it’s not him who does. He remains heartbreakingly and terrifyingly human throughout this whole ordeal. It messes up with your expectations.
Although I didn’t finish my viewing crippled by terror like I did for Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Color Out of Space… kind of gave me nightmares and “funny” dreams. It’s hard to build a nuanced atmosphere when your movie is perpetually bathed in overt purple/pink light, but director Richard Stanley has one or two grotesque tricks up his sleeve that subconsciously stick with you long after. It’s like a baseball pitcher with a mean-ass fastball. You know exactly what’s coming, but it’s going to bean you in the face harder than you thought.
I wouldn’t say Color Out of Space is an iconic horror movie, but it gets the job done in ways you’d never expect. Richard Stanley committed to a very precise idea and the end result is infinitely more scary an atmospheric than your typical movie about a creepy granny living in the walls. Color Out of Space is what B cinema should be in 2020: overt, organic, unapologetic and wildly imperfect. Not for the faint of heart, but I had a pretty good time with it.
7.6/10
