Color Out of Space review – Nicolas Cage can’t save Lovecraftian misfire

Anyone even attempting to translate the incomprehensible cosmic horrors of H.P. Lovecraft to the big screen deserves at least a little credit. Lovecraft’s stories, after all, are known for their exploration of terrors that cannot be understood by the human mind, often manifesting in ways which are surreal, illogical, and unknowable. Writer-director Richard Stanley, adapting classic Lovecraft short “The Colour Out of Space,” is the latest filmmaker to try and evoke what many would deem impossible. In this case, they’d be right. Unable to decide whether he’s making a comedy, a horror, or something else entirely, his efforts fall mostly flat.

This adaptation clearly owes allegiance to Alex Garland’s excellent – and very Lovecraftian – sci-fi horror Annihilation, not to mention Panos Cosmatos’s recent phantasmagoric revenge yarn Mandy, which like this film had Nicolas Cage doing his “thing” in the lead role. But whilst Annihilation took its horror seriously and Mandy understood that it was a ridiculous B-movie at its core, Stanley tries to split the difference and comes up short: Color Out of Space is not particularly scary, thrilling, or funny, which makes its nearly two hour runtime somewhat agonising to sit through.

The razor-thin story concerns the Gardners, a family of farmers who are exposed to an increasingly bizarre series of cosmic incidents after a glowing meteorite crash lands in their yard and begins to infect the landscape – and the film – with a strange, pinky-purple hue. Stanley attempts to shed a light on how dealing with something unexplainable could break even the tightest family unit, but we never get a sense of who this family are to begin with – nor why we should care. As its patriarch, Nicolas Cage begins in uncharacteristically normal dad mode (disturbing in its own way), but soon descends into a kind of screaming madness – complete with questionable accent – that feels way more contrived in its desire to create meme-worthy moments than any of his “crazy” roles to date. Meanwhile, Elliot Knight is miscast as a hydrologist investigating the area’s water supply, whilst Joely Richardson, Madeline Arthur, Q’orianka Kilcher, and Brendan Meyer are fine but forgettable as the rest of the Gardner clan.

There are some nice – if occasionally cheap-looking – visuals. When Cage delivers a line about alpacas with his usual scenery-chewing gusto, it’s hard not to at least grin. But Color Out of Space eventually winds up feeling like a series of random scenes that Stanley hopes can be enjoyed on their trippiness factor alone. In spite of the swirling colours and fleshy creature designs that seem plucked right out of John Carpenter’s The Thing, none of this is particularly interesting to watch without an emotional hook, or a goal for our characters to pursue. They’re trapped in the great unknown, and so are we.

★★☆☆☆

By: Tom Barnard

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This film was screened to the press as part of the BFI London Film Festival 2019. For more information and showtimes for this year’s festival, head to our dedicated page.