Saturday 14 March 2020

IN THEATRES: Colo(u)r out of Space

A family living in the middle of the woods find their lives turned upside down after an asteroid lands in their front yard. While this event is destabilising enough, events take a turn for the worse...



HP Lovecraft. Nicholas Cage. Richard Stanley.

Add all those names up = colour me intrigued.

I will admit that I never really got in to Lovecraft. His influence has permeated popular culture so I know the familiar things every other nerd does (here's looking at you Water!). I think the only story of his I finished was The Dunwich Horror. I bought At the Mountains of Madness but did not get far.

Watching this movie so soon after Village of the Damned, I was stuck by how this movie accomplishes so much more as a horror thriller and as an interpretation of its literary source's sense of tone. This movie feels unsafe - we watch a family break down, and this is played out in unflinching detail.

This is taking place in a couple of ways, some in terms of performance/character choices, some stylistic and some in terms of imagery/taboo-breaking. The breakdown of social order, the breakdown of the body, the breakdown of the rules of the world (space, time, technology).

The most terrifying aspect of Lovecraft to me is that the human characters are often incidental to the action - they are witnesses, bystanders and collateral damage to forces whose appearance and motive are beyond our comprehension. This movie’s audio-visual approach is all about this, especially in terms of extending the characters' confusion to the viewer.

One element in this is Nic Cage’s performance - oscillating rapidly between performative gestures and understated family man, it is difficult to tell whether he is acting out growing panic, or he is being overtaken by the effects of the 'color'.

The filmmakers do a great job of racking up the tension - gradually adding layers of sound design, off-kilter lighting, and increasingly fast editing until the diegesis we have been used to has been completely transformed. In light of COD-19, I am not sure if I will be able to go to a theatre for a while, but I am so glad I watched this in a theatre. This is a fully audio-visual experience - every element is designed to disorient and disturb you. 


Speaking of disturbing, the body horror imagery is well-done. Even though I think its thunder has been stolen by John Carpenter’s The Thing and Brian Yuzna’s Society it still works because the filmmakers do not just understand Lovecraft approach to horror, but because they understand that it is scarier if the viewer is not able to grasp exactly what they are seeing. We see flashes of explicit and abject horrors, but it is largely kept in shadow or offscreen, augmented by sound design. It is deliberately disconcerting, which makes the flashes of horror all the more effective.

I do not want to go into more detail. Once this movie is available to stream, turn the lights off, close the blinds and throw your phone down a well: Color out of Space is a legitimately terrific horror movie.

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