Color Out Of Space: Alienation

Just to address this right off the bat, this is an adaptation/re-imagining/call it what you want of the original story by H.P. Lovecraft, whose legacy is permanently tarnished by his abhorrent beliefs about race, gender, and class. But this adaptation - as is true of many adaptations of his work - makes it pretty clear that even though his stories are likely the product of a mind that was scared shitless of anything and everything different from itself, you can excise those elements without really losing what makes them good. Strip away the dehumanizing depictions of nonwhites and the rural poor, and the bones of his stories remain: There are things out there beyond our comprehension, impossibly ancient, and we are nothing to them, to be undone by them in a blink. That all kinds of authors and filmmakers are finding ways to preserve their strengths while discarding the unnecessary bigotry, and even go so far as to use his work as a way to actively critique the very notions of race and class that Lovecraft espoused seems to be both a testimony to the underlying power of what’s been dubbed “cosmic horror” and how much our culture has changed since his time. There’s still (obviously, obviously) a lot of work do and miles to go, as current events so vividly demonstrate, but at least on this front I’m encouraged.

So let’s talk about Color Out Of Space. This story of incomprehensible alien appetite takes its time to get where it’s going, but boy does it get there.

The film opens with a voiceover about the woods west of Arkham, and how the person speaking always knew they were supposed to be haunted, someplace you didn’t go, but only now does he really understand what that means, and this is accompanied by long, slow tracking shots of a forest, fitfully lit through haze and fog, the trees thin and gnarled, almost looking more like stalks or tentacles than anything else. The person speaking is a young man named Ward Phillips (I see what you did there), and he’s a hydrologist, sent to survey the water table in Arkham in advance of a new hydroelectric dam project. And it’s while he’s surveying this area that he meets the Gardner family.

The Gardner family - Nathan, Theresa, and their children Ben, Lavinia, and Jack - are…complicated. They’re former hippies now as up in arms over their children’s language and weed smoking as the previous generation was about theirs, and their kids are just as restless as they were in their youth. Ben mostly smokes weed and watches astronomical models on his computer, Lavinia practices witchcraft in the woods but yearns for fast food. Jack is mostly just a kid, too young to really know any other way of life. Nathan had a contentious relationship with his own father, but still ended up coming home to the family farm, where he now raises alpacas while Theresa is the breadwinner, working as some kind of financial consultant with clients all over the world. Their youthful rebellion has mellowed into complacent eccentricity.

At least, until a meteorite crashes into their yard in the middle of the night - a meteorite that gives off a strange light (specifically magenta - a color not produced by visible light). The next day, Lavinia feels sick, Nathan keeps smelling something and Jack starts talking to a “friend” in the well on their property.

And then strange flowers start to bloom. Magenta flowers. And things and people start to…change.

I guess if I were to try and pin a theme to this film, I’d say it’s about transformation. Some of this is physical - the odd magenta flowers sprouting everywhere, oversized magenta insects, strange contaminations in the water, electromagnetic interference, and soon enough, a sickly, poisonous light that corrupts everything it touches. But some of it is psychological. The events of the film as they unfold put the Gardner family under tremendous stress, and it affects each of them in very different ways, ways that seem to illustrate some kind of fundamental trait or impulse laid bare. Nathan’s fatherly calm warps into denial, Lavinia searches for increasingly more drastic ways to escape her surroundings, Ben, ever the gentle stoner, does his best to do what he needs to, but becomes increasingly forgetful, and Jack and Theresa…well, a mother has a bond with her youngest, doesn’t she? So everything and everyone is changing, and the only one who seems to have a handle on what’s happening is Ezra - an unreconstructed flower child squatting in a shack on the Gardner’s land, and of course nobody’s listening to him. Gradually, things and people start to change, whether they’re aware of it or not. They become, quite literally, alienated. From the world, and from each other.

And this change, this sense of things becoming alien, is strongly communicated in the look of the film. It’s shot in a vivid, almost hallucinatory style, most recently similar to Mandy and Annihilation - colors are highly saturated, and there’s a lot of haze and bloom on everything, so even before things start getting really strange there’s a strangeness to it, a sense of dreaminess. Scenes are transitioned or intercut with almost microphotographic shots of nature, observed so closely that trees and insects and even running water seem alien. And things get strange gradually, first in little details, then increasingly more dramatic ones, then chaos. This is a carefully paced film that runs a measured course from “hmmm, that’s odd” to “what the fuck was that” over an almost two-hour run time, with any sense of normalcy - physical, spatial, temporal, or psychological - disintegrating completely by the end. It takes numerous liberties with the source material, but little nods to Lovecraft are sprinkled throughout, in names of people and places (and the occasional visual Easter egg) and even in some ways to previous film treatments of his ideas and themes. Notably, as things come to a head there’s a shift to body horror that hearkens back to spiritually Lovecraftian stories like The Thing, as well as Stuart Gordon’s pulpy 1980s Lovecraft adaptations Re-Animator and From Beyond. The Gardner family comes apart in more ways than one, their essential natures stretched to grotesque extremes, and the film grows more histrionic as they do.

Were I to find any fault with this film (and it’s tough, this is really well-done), I’d say that I felt like it maybe didn’t quite stick the landing at the very end. I spent a decent chunk of the film thinking I knew how it was going to end, based on story beats signposted throughout, and when it didn’t, well, on the one hand I’m glad it wasn’t predictable, but a somewhat subdued epilogue after a pretty bonkers climax fell a little flat to me. But this is a nitpick, it made narrative sense, and the film as a whole is very well-executed. The director has stated he’d like to make two more Lovecraft adaptations. If this is the caliber of what we’re going to get, bring it on.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon