The most recent film adaptation of one of H. P. Lovecraft’s most lauded and sinister tales, “The Colour Out of Space,” seems to have been resuscitated by Richard Stanley (who famously got ousted from the director’s chair during the production travails of 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau) at a time when the human race couldn’t be any more familiar with the physical and emotional effects of “the unknown.” Or rather, an entity that can’t be tamed, contained or fully understood. In the case of the Nicolas Cage-starring Color Out of Space, released limitedly in late January (when movie theaters still had a vague prayer of sustaining themselves), that “unknown” remains the same villain as in Lovecraft’s original story: an unexplained meteorite that lands near the well of the Gardner family’s home in a remote, rural East Coast town called Arkham (a fictional place invented by Lovecraft, and that, yes, later inspired the mental institution’s moniker in Batman).
Not just any meteorite. But one that oozes with colors beyond the normal realm of human imagination. This notion of the average person’s senses had been deemed “extremely limited” by one of the men who inspired Lovecraft’s story, Hugh Elliott, the writer behind the 1919 work of nonfiction, Modern Science and Materialism.
Within the limitations of human sensory perceptions is also the ability to fathom that something so purposelessly sinister could exist. That it could infect without warning and motive, silently and slowly–all at once overpowering its host. Yes, it sounds too familiar in the current landscape. Yet for Nathan Gardner (Cage), the decision to move his family to his father’s “country” house in Arkham is something he’s too committed to, and would never turn back from under any circumstance. That the arrangement came in the wake of his wife, Theresa (Joely Richardson–remember her from Nip/Tuck?), recovering from a mastectomy only adds to the tenseness between everyone, including the one Nathan shares with their daughter, Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur), their oldest son, Benny (Brendan Meyer), and, to a lesser extent, their youngest, Jack (Julian Hilliard), who tends to communicate only with the family dog as a means of solace.
Nathan’s harebrained scheme to live a better, simpler life by way of raising alpacas for their milk and generally becoming a house husband seems only to backfire again and again as Theresa continues to perform her job as a stock trader. Or at least attempts to perform it with the shoddy wi-fi connection available to them, the one that she keeps screaming impatiently at Nathan to fix… a rage that gets intensified by the advent of the meteor. The one rife with the brilliant and mesmeric Color, our increasingly unignorable antagonist of the tale. The fact that it lands near a well speaks to its additional effects on the town’s water supply.
Indeed, opening with a scene of water surveyor Ward Phillips (Elliot Knight), we’re given ample foreshadowing about how the water supply is going to fuck with the Gardners’ heads once the Color seeps into it. As for Ward’s introduction to Lavinia, he interrupts one of her Wiccan rituals–the ones she’s been performing of late to “heal” her mother. This prompts her to get angry and leave him in a flirtatious huff, returning to her sequestered house to find that Nathan has been cooking something terrible again as a means to alleviate Theresa’s physical hardships. The family has no relief of any of its burdens, however–least of all its cumbersome emotional ones. This is further weighed upon with the advent of the meteor and its Color spewing, soon causing strange effects on the perception of time and reality, particularly as the family is essentially in a quarantined state, removed from the rest of the world except for a hermit named Ezra (Tommy Chong) who lives in a nearby ramshackle and occasionally smokes weed with Benny.
Eventually, Ezra makes his own discovery about what the Color is doing, whether consciously or intuitively–which is to say, its only aim is to make this realm as hospitable to itself as the one from whence it came. And yes, such an unstoppable objective ends up setting off a butterfly effect everywhere around it that will, by the end of the carnage, render its warpath nothing more than a “blasted heath.”
Co-produced by Elijah Wood, someone who can appreciate the fact that there is nothing imagined in film that can be weirder than what happens in real life, the escalating absurdity of the movie builds upon H. P. Lovecraft’s original premise. The fact that Richard Stanley has been a long-time fan of Lovecraft and this specific story since his preadolescence (thanks to his mother’s own ardor for the author) adds to the attention to detail and care with which he approached the narrative, one as trippy and inexplicable as the one we’re presently living in.
