Color Out of Space (2020)

Richard Stanley's Color Out of Space arrives with the gravity of a man returning from a long exile, which he is, and he applies himself to Lovecraft's least adaptable story with a farmer's patience. The Gardner family relocates to a New England farmstead to escape the twenty-first century. A meteor lands. The land begins to drink them. What follows is mutation, madness, and a great deal of screaming in the rain. The film is spectacle first and argument almost never.

On representation, the film casts Elliot Knight as the hydrologist Ward Phillips and Q'orianka Kilcher as Mayor Tooma, populating rural Arkham with faces the genre usually keeps at the margins. The film never remarks on this, which is to its credit and also the limit of its ambition. The women fare similarly. Lavinia is a teenage Wiccan who cuts her own palm for a ritual. Theresa runs a business and has survived a mastectomy. Neither fact is pressed into service as a thesis. A hydrologist surveys the land for a dam, the groundwater turns oily and wrong, and we can detect the faintest environmental hum beneath the cosmic static. Tommy Chong squats on the property as a hippie holdout against modernity, which is as close as the film comes to a position on capital. It does not get closer.

The body horror is abundant and the body positivity is absent, which is the correct arrangement for a film about a colour that eats alpacas. No character is neurodivergent, no history is revised, no sermon is delivered. The family's dissolution is caused by an alien infection, not by society, and the film lets the universe be indifferent. That indifference is the real subject here, and it is a relief. The Color is not a metaphor for our times. It is a colour, and it wants nothing. We leave the theatre unsettled and unlectured, which in this climate counts as a small mercy.

{"thematic_tags": ["book_adaptation"]}