Color Out of Space is a strong contender for being the best film opening this weekend if you are into horror/sci fi and a strong shot over the bow of 2020. It is a film adaptation of a H.P. Lovecraft story with the same title. Even though the headliner is Nicholas Cage, do not let that dissuade you from seeing this film. Cage stars in so many films that statistically some of them have to be good, and this one is. Also the entire cast acts as an ensemble, and the real lead seems to be Madeleine Arthur, who plays the teenage daughter. When I saw the previews and heard that this film had the same producers as Mandy, I knew that I would regret it if I did not see it in theaters. Now I want to see it repeatedly.
Color Out of Space unfolds in an isolated, bucolic wooded area which initially seems timeless even medieval, but is a restored paternal Gardner family farm. The casting is brilliant. The people of color, a Native American mayor and a black water surveyor, are the outsiders, part of the civilized world, ordinary, recognizably part of our world, but at the fringes of this one. The main characters are the Gardner family who have retreated from civilization to create their own world and have little social graces in order to function in the real world on a good day. Even their teenage daughter, who hates this insular dynamic, is blissfully unaware of how odd she is, and she classifies the surveyor as weird. It is like meeting the Munster family. By seeing the Gardners through the eyes of an ordinary black man, it helps the viewer understand that on their best day, these characters are fairly strange, but ultimately harmless and their strangeness could simply be filed under “stuff white people like” so when they start to act out of the ordinary for them and things start to go bonkers, a viewer can see the difference and no longer dismiss it as quirkiness. Since the title gives away the source of the sudden escalation in oddness, I do not think that I will be giving away too much by hinting that the source of their problem came from space, but has become a part of their environment. It permeates the land, and it is in their water.
Color Out of Space has two forgettable moments, which seem pivotal to understanding the moral of this film. Before the meteorite hits, there is a shot from the well’s point of view. It presents a blurry, out of focus image of the younger son and the teenage girl above as they discuss whether or not they could see stars in the well. After the meteorite hits, the mayor casually calls out, “You should have let me buy the land when you had the chance,” and she drives off never to be seen again. I was transfixed by the idea that the father, who clearly had bad memories of the place, would want to hold on to this land. It suggests that long before the meteorite came, there was some traumatic impulse that compels this family to return and stay on this land, something alien already in the well drawing them in, but they do not originally come from that land. It is set in New England so this land originally belongs to Native Americans. The mayor is no noble, altruistic figure. She is potentially a threat to the entire Eastern seaboard because of her eagerness to exploit the natural resources of the area for economic growth, which may lead to broader contamination, but the family’s superficially stubborn, recalcitrant attitude towards civilization and from returning the land at a profit to someone who probably has more of a right to it than they do—note the sneer when the father says Boston as if it is a slur, not a city—suggests a fundamentalist belief that they know better and want to isolate themselves from the outside world. The film then shows how toxic it is for a family when they take sticking together to its extreme. It reminds me of It Chapter One meets Midsommar by combining the idea of self-deportation, move from urban to rural, and reverse immigration, returning to your roots taken to its extreme at the end of the film, through the microcosm of the typical American nuclear family and the tyranny of absolute parental rights over children.
Color Out of Space is definitely turning a critical eye to the idea that parents always know what is best for their children. Instead parents are the real danger as they unintentionally force their kids to stay in a toxic environment until a child can know no life outside of it and cannot escape to have a healthy life without being thoroughly infected by that environment. Families are not meant to stay together forever, held apart from all outside influences, but are meant to create members who will be able to leave those families and become functional adults yet the parents instinctually lash out when their daughter interacts with an outsider. The mother is shocked by her vehemence. I was fascinated by the rich variety of images of an alien indescribable force sucking and deforming healthy life to create something alien, unhealthy and toxic. The distorted image of reverse birth, a nightmarish answer to Nicodemus’ question, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born? (John 3:4)” Mothers are dangerous and grotesque figures if they do not generate life or place you in the path of destruction, especially if you still drink from their tit long after you are old enough to eat real food. The water is equated with mother’s milk, but one should not assume that mother is earth given the trajectory of the film.
On a macro scale, Color Out of Space is a literal critique/metaphor of the real alien, white supremacy, an invasive species sucking the life out of real, lovable people trying to live a full life under conditions in which a full life cannot flourish, and the alien feeds off of them until it is stronger than they are and leaves everything in its wake desiccated. All people are affected by it in different ways, but no one is immune though I do not think that the director/casting director just accidentally made the person with a fighting chance against the alien color be a person of color. This person of color is just as vulnerable as all human beings to this alien, but is slightly more resistant because of a lower level of prolonged exposure. Because he can see that his attachment to the people that he cares about has evaporated, he can be resistant to being drawn into a world that only resembles, but is not actually populated by them, just their specters whereas they keep going back for their dead, getting drawn to danger instead of escaping even when they know better because it still seems like home. He is still tempted by the siren song, but because he does not have a welcome place in that home, he is not fooled for long; however because he can see the specters and cannot escape its influence, he can still be absorbed. People of color cannot completely buy into the dream, the delusion because it is not a reality that they share with others. They are relegated to the margins. Even the teen girl who is interested in him greets with hostility that he is trespassing and on private property. There is ambiguity whether or not someone was going to shoot him or the alien threat—is he more of a danger than the alien? He is a person trying to get them to see how crazy everything is, and that they can live better away from that environment, but they can’t leave write off their loved ones. They have literally drank the Kool-Aid or water. It was only after I finished watching the film and had this impression that I learned that the director is a white man from South Africa with a very interesting personal family history. His father may have inspired Heart of Darkness.
Color Out of Space would make a great double feature with Dark Waters, especially given the parallels of both families suffering side effects from something entering their water that a human being cannot digest except one movie is fiction and belongs to sci fi/horror genre, and the other is reality. The plight of the young boys reminded me of Parasite. This film is what Annihilation and The Dead Don’t Die should have aimed at becoming, and specifically Tommy Chong as the outsider squatter has some lines that would make perfect quotes, and I am so disappointed that IMDb does not list a single one. This film pays homage to such wonderful classics as Evil Dead, Predator, Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, Close Encounters of The Third Kind, even The Last Jedi. After Banshee Chapter, it may be my favorite film adaptation of a H.P. Lovecraft story.
Fun fact: Josh C. Waller plays the sheriff, but I did not recognize him as the director of a couple of great Zoe Bell films, Raze and Camino. What great company!