Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space, the filmmaker’s first narrative feature since being fired from 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, is a mostly faithful retelling of H.P. Lovecraft’s story of the same name. The film’s biggest diversion from the source material outside of the modern-day setting is the way it tonally complicates Lovecraft’s oblique sense of dread with a streak of black comedy. Surprisingly, the comedic elements only deepen the story’s overwhelming despair as the film traces the effects of a meteorite containing some ineffable alien presence that crashes into a family’s rural farm.
Much of this owes to Nicolas Cage as Nathan, the patriarch of the Gardener family. Not unlike Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Cage takes a character originally conceived as a normal man gradually descending into madness and portrays him as someone whose madness is already there, barely restrained and ready to explode at the slightest spark. Which isn’t to say that Nathan exudes violence. At first, he suggests an extreme eccentric, pointedly living away from nearby townspeople and buying a herd of alpacas to raise as the “animal of the future.” Nathan can also be charming and loving, especially in early scenes with his family. In a scene that softly acknowledges his wife Theresa’s (Joely Richardson) mastectomy, he wryly but lovingly soothes her fears about having sex by saying that he was always a leg man anyway.
Then one night, after a bright fuchsia light fills the sky and a meteorite crashes into the front yard of the family’s farmstead, more than just Nathan’s eccentricity begins to distort. Stanley parcels out the effects of the crash with great precision, noting the growth of strange flowers and the static that plagues the family’s television and phones. The Gardeners, too, begin to exhibit strange behavior, as when Nathan and Theresa’s young son, Jack (Julian Hilliard), stares at a well and says he’s playing with his “friend,” whistling at the well and being met by a high-pitched whistle in response. And Theresa at one point becomes hypnotized while chopping vegetables, lopping off the tips of two fingers without batting an eye.
The transformations in the film, so faithful to those in Lovecraft’s iconic short story, largely call attention to just how much “Color Out of Space” has profoundly influenced cinema. The rapidly terraforming land around the farmstead, which blossoms elaborate and colorful plants that defy classification, recalls the genetic mutations of Alex Garland’s adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, while the film’s second half leans into a monstrous spectacle of gene-splicing horror, with creatures collapsing into bloody and fused forms, can seem more like a nod to The Thing than a reminder of where John Carpenter got his ideas from.
Color Out of Space distinguishes itself from other films to directly and indirectly tackle Lovecraft’s story with sound mixing that, by collapsing distinct sound effects into a massive field of blended noises, excellently captures the alien’s altering of the DNA of flora and fauna. Late in the film, the hideousness of one show of body horror is hammered home as much through the mixing of moans of pain and incomprehension on the soundtrack as it is through the sight of a mound of melted, bubbling flesh that used to be a human being. And Colin Stetson’s score awesomely accents the horror of the story throughout. Stetson specializes in crafting music out of looping sounds that he complicates and slowly redirects, and the warping loops of his synthesized howls and saxophone drones epitomize Color Out of Space’s grasp of introducing small variations that spiral into chaotic new directions.
Impressively, the film even manages to plot a logical through line for Cage’s performance, which explodes in unpredictable directions as Nathan’s sanity increasingly deteriorates, with the actor’s most manic tics, such as his jerking motions and high-pitched whine, feeling as if they’ve been piped in from 1988’s Vampire’s Kiss. Nathan’s whiplash-inducing emotional pivots—such as the way he abruptly screams at his family one moment only to apologize to them the next—can be as funny as they are upsetting, though his non-sequitur outbursts are mostly the former (“Don’t you know how expensive those alpacas were!”). Connecting these jagged emotional fluctuations is the desire of a man to keep his family together, whether as a father hoping to keep his loved ones safe or as a deranged, brainwashed zombie compelled to make that family part of the alien’s grotesque fusion of bodily forms.
Color Out of Space occasionally strains itself in reaching for contemporary resonance with hollow references to climate change and other modern misfortunes. But it never strays far from Lovecraft’s fixation on the limits of what the human mind can endure, positioning Cage as a kind of tribute to the enduring pull of the story, its vivid depiction of how a confrontation with the unknown can so easily shatter the fragile bonds that hold us together.
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