In the new film by Richard Stanley (Hardware and, more notoriously, 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau), a meteorite falls out of the sky and onto the Gardner property. It happens relatively early in the film, shortly after the family – amateur gardener/whiskey connoisseur father Nathan (Nicolas Cage), workaholic mother Theresa (Joely Richardson), pot-smoking son Benny (Brendan Meyer), Wicca Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) and bespectacled toddler Jack (Julian Hilliard) – has been introduced.
The New England is gorgeous and remote, an hour’s drive from the nearest hospital (an important fact). It and the palatial house in which the Gardners live is a family inheritance from Nathan’s father. This is a development that Nathan is struggling to adjust to; he never intended to become a farmer like the old man. Stanley’s screenplay makes it clear that the decision to move to the country has not been without controversy: Theresa’s attic-situated home office is plagued by a bad internet connection and Lavinia opens the film performing a spell to ensure her mother continues to recover from cancer, but also for personal escape.
These introductory scenes are brief, but they provide backstory on the family and insight into the day-to-day dynamics of life on the farm (alpaca milk anyone?). Ordinarily, this would all be essential information to understand how the family – or who – will prevail the threat to come, but perhaps because Color Out of Space is an adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft short story, very little character information winds up being important.
When as the meteorite strikes, it arrives late at night in a neon-purple/fuchsia saturated glow that permeates the homestead. Only Jack is truly awake and paying attention and he bears the brunt of the colorful impact, temporarily screaming and going into a non-responsive stupor. This reaction would seemingly indicate that Jack is the most affected, but this is another misdirect. Shortly afterwards, the landscape of the farm – and yes, nearly all of the residents, animals and people included – begin to change. Strange flowers start to grow where before there were none, a large multi-eyed praying mantis/dragonfly crawls out of the well, and the alpacas…well, let’s just say that this isn’t going to be PETA’s banner film of the year.
Initially, all of these events feel appropriately odd and there is a steady narrative escalation. When Theresa goes into a trance and suffers a bad accident while preparing dinner, Color Out of Space still feels on track, particularly as Lavinia experiences vomit-inducing migraines as a result of the persistent aural feedback and Jack “talks” to a new friend in the well. Alas, these are the last few notes of clarity: from this point on, as the family is increasingly manipulated by the sounds, the frequencies and, yes, the titular colors of the meteorite, Stanley’s loses control of the film.
The film’s biggest issue is twofold: the script and the acting (by way of direction). For nearly the entire second half of the film, characters behave irrationally. They are prone to sudden, violent mood swings or they react to horrifying events as though they are removed from the situation. Initially, each family member appears to have their own type of reaction to the otherworldly influence: Nathan becomes uncontrollably angry, Lavinia experiences headaches, Jack sits outside all day, laughing at nothing, etc.
But then the reactions begin to bleed together, so Theresa also becomes uncontrollably angry at times (but then not others), and Nathan experiences hallucinations through the TV screen, just like Benny (who also randomly disappears for a long stretch, something no one in or outside the film seems to care about).
The rules of what is happening on the farm are ill-defined, and the world-building is poorly executed. At times it seems that the infection is passing through the water, which has turned more viscous. At others, it simply seems as though the family need only walk or drive away from the farm to escape its colorful impact. One character, Ward Phillips (Elliot Knight), a visiting graduate student studying the water table who catches Lavinia’s eye, comes and goes, seemingly without issue.
Nothing is consistent, so as the film progresses, it devolves into a series of repetitive scenes of the family making stupid, seemingly out of character decisions without any indication of what is motivating them. The obvious, easy response is simply that the family is going mad and sometimes they experience moments of lucidity when they act like their old selves. That may be a possibility, but it is inherently unsatisfying to watch a film where things sometimes make sense and other times don’t.
And then there are the performances. This is a Nicolas Cage film and Nathan does go crazy, so Color Out of Space frequently tends to veer directly into high camp territory when he is onscreen (example: when the car won’t start, Nathan calls it a “cock sucker” and punches the ceiling for approximately fifteen seconds). The issue with casting Cage (now? Always?) is that audiences are primed to laugh at every line of dialogue or reaction, so even when Cage is having a heartfelt moment with a grievously injured Theresa late in the film, it inspires laughter…and not in a way that benefits the film.
Add to this the fact that everyone is acting in a different film, seemingly directed by Stanley to match their performance to their individual storyline. Lavinia is in a coming of age YA text about amateur witchcraft (which comes to nothing) and first crushes (which comes to next to nothing). Theresa is in a workplace drama about a harried mother with a bad router that has her “hemorrhaging clients” (and who could care?). Jack and Benny receive something less than arcs, while Ward – seemingly the outsider with the vital information who will save the day – literally disappears for a full act (as though he’s been forgotten), only to return in time for the climax.
Visually the film looks great, particularly the FX heavy finale when the color goes into overdrive and the environment becomes unsustainable for human life. By this time, however, not even the film’s proclivity for odd and unusual imagery is enough to overlook the meandering plot and the gratingly out of synch performances. Color Out of Space feels painfully long and, even more so than Mom & Dad, this is an example of a film that loses more than it gains from an unintentionally campy Nic Cage performance. The result is a film that feels like a torturous slog.
