Color Out Of Space

Color Out Of Space (2019)

Dr. Richard Stanley

Written by Richard Stanley, Scarlett Amaris, based on "The Colour Out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft

Starring Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Brendan Meyer

I was dreading this one just as much as I was looking forward to it, which is always the way I approach a career resurgence by an artist like director Richard Stanley, i.e. an ambitious wunderkind who produced two good-bordering-on-great early works and then dramatically vanished from the scene. That’s about as surefire a recipe to end up over rated as has yet been conceived by man. Nothing drives up an artist’s stock like unavailability; it’s how Jeff Buckley went from being a guy who made a decent folk album to a legendary romantic genius, or how LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT went from a critically panned matinee flick to the holy grail of lost cinema. Rarely does such a sudden and lengthy departure from the artistic scene reverse itself,* but that is precisely what Stanley has managed, by seizing on his unexpected reemergence in the cultural zeitgeist (brought about by the 2014 release of the documentary LOST SOUL, which depicts Stanley’s disastrous attempt to make THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU back in 1996) to mount a comeback. And so it is that Richard Stanley returns from the elite ranks of artists whose legendary status was largely built on unrealized potential, to the more Earthy realm of artists who have to justify their hype by, you know, actually making art.

That’s a dangerous thing for an artist who has quietly built a rather enviable reputation largely around the promise of unrealized projects, which will always remain perfect and pristine, safely locked away in our imaginations. There are any number of ways this can disappoint you. You can discover that, after all this time, the promising young artist was just that – promising, not fully formed, all hype and no delivery. You can discover that the promising young artist really did have something once, but lost it somewhere along the way – lost the fire of youth, lost the touch, just lost interest. Or, even worse, you can discover that the promise was legitimate and the talent is still there, but the time has passed, and something that would have seemed boundary-pushing and exciting in the artist’s heyday now feels dated and played-out. I must admit that I absolutely assumed Stanley’s return to directing** was more likely to fall into one of those many pitfalls than it was to represent a triumphant return to a long-denied cinematic wunderkind.

 Actually neither turns out to be the case, but I'm surprised and happy to report that it's closer to the latter than the former. COLOR OUT OF SPACE*** is not a great movie, but it is quite a good one, demonstrating some real moxie and craftsmanship which mark it as the undeniable work of someone with some real talent, even if a few missteps are made along the way. And frankly that shocked the hell out of me. I was all but certain that three decades in the cold would have left Stanley diminished and rusty if not out-and-out broken, and that’s even that takes for granted his two early-90s successes weren’t a fluke to begin with. I was expecting a latter-day Argento-style disappointment, but COLOR OUT OF SPACE reveals a director as ambitious and gifted as he's ever been. Which is not to say it's a work of untouchable genius or anything, but his two 90's movies were the work of a genre director with real promise. Thirty years later, he's still promising. That's better than I thought I could reasonably hope for.

As the 500 word of preamble make obvious, then, this movie comes with some baggage by virtue of its director, and that's before we even add the extra weight of its star (one-time Oscar winner and beloved internet meme Nic Cage, deep in his direct-to-video rampage) and its source material (H.P. “The Sauce” Lovecraft's genre-defining classic short story of the same title). It buckles under all that weight, of course –it’s hard to imagine any movie that wouldn’t-- but manages to keep from ever completely collapsing, and that in itself is kind of an accomplishment. As a Stanley comeback, it proves he was worthy of our interest, if not our hyperbole. As a Lovecraft adaptation, it's astonishingly good, although in a large part by virtue of the miserable company that descriptor places it in. As a Nic Cage movie... well, that's a little more up for debate, but at least he’s always gonna give you your money’s worth.

Before we get to that, though, we might as well talk about the actual plot. Amazingly, though the story is updated to the present day, this turns out to be a broadly faithful riff on the original Lovecraft story, which recounts the tale of the rural Gardner family, whose lives are thrown into escalating madness by the arrival of a meteor which brings with it an “unknown color” that gradually subverts and distorts the environment, and the bodies and minds of the people in it. You know Stanley really gets Lovecraft because he mimics the author’s characteristic style of writing a story-within-a-story (the original is actually a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, the gripping saga of a guy who interviews another guy about a third guy, but Stanley is content with merely one framing device). The details vary, especially as the movie progresses and gradually pivots towards Cronenbergian body horror, but the essence of the original story is clearly still here, along with most of the major incidents. It is, I would hesitate to say, one of the most faithful Lovecraft adaptations I’ve ever seen, not that it has a great deal of competition in that regard.

Of course, Lovecraft adaptations, even generally faithful ones, are practically preordained to be garbage. But COLOR OUT OF SPACE draws its unusual strength from its atmosphere, cultivated with great care by Stanley, DOP Steve Annis (a music video guy til 2019's I AM MOTHER), production designer Katie Byron (BOOKSMART, FINAL GIRLS) and composer Colin Stetson (HEREDITARY). It adds up to a look and feel which neatly captures Lovecraft's sense of creeping, insinuating wrongness. This is absolutely essential to any prayer of meaningful adapting Lovecraft, and it’s the one thing that virtually every other film version of his work fumbles miserably (including the previous adaptations of this very short story, a 1965 Boris-Karloff-starring AIP production under the dubious title DIE MONSTER DIE and the 1987 Wil Wheaton movie THE CURSE). Even RE-ANIMATOR, arguably the only legitimately good Lovecraft movie ever made, can’t claim that; it doubles down on goopy effects and campy humor instead. Capturing the classic Lovecraftian sense of cosmic, incomprehensible unease is a tough thing to do, but Stanley and company manage it beautifully here, and without even a trace of the pretentious self-consciousness that has defined a lot of modern "post-horror" movies with similar ambitions. In a world of THE VVITCHes and HEREDITARYs, I’d almost forgotten that “heavy on atmospheric dread” does not have to mean “gloomy” and “glacial,” but Stanley keeps things colorful and spritely while managing to work up quite a head of anxiety. It’s Lovecraft distilled through the mind of a distinctly oddball auteur**** (I doubt ol’ H.P. would have thought to introduce our protagonist in the middle of a white magic ceremony as a cute little character detail, or clarify that the hippie holy fool who squats on their property as a cat named “G-Spot”) but it is still very recognizably Lovecraft, a virtue which, despite the virtual cottage industry his work has inspired, almost nothing else can boast.

The movie is also helped quite a bit by a surprisingly fine cast, who vividly portray the family’s gradual slide into dreamy madness while still crafting sharply-defined, likeable --and often quite funny!-- characters. In the Q & A that followed the screening, Stanley mentions that he worked with the actors on their characters’ backstories, which makes sense; even though we get only tiny glimpses into what their lives were like before the events of the film, they feel unusually fully-formed. Even as things get weird, the family dynamic feels complex and lived-in; they seem unusually genuine for a genre movie, convincingly reading as an existing family unit rather than a bunch of body count whose existence is entirely defined by the circumstances of the plot. Madeline Arthur (BIG EYES) as the Gardner family’s teenage daughter and our protagonist, is especially great, managing a character who feels very lively and specific in a way which the movie absolutely does not require, but definitely benefits from. Brendan Meyer (THE GUEST) and Joely Richardson (EVENT HORIZON) do equally nuanced, likeable character work with the older brother and anxiety-fraught mother, respectively.

And of course, you’ve also got the father, one Nicolas Cage. He’s, um, a real character, possibly a little unhinged, given to doing a verbal impersonation of his own father, who all visual and audio evidence suggests was born in, like 1885, despite the movie taking place in modern times. IMDB trivia claims that “Richard Stanley's favorite Cage Movie is Vampire's Kiss (1988), [and] he asked Nicolas to use the same style of performance,” a claim I was initially rather dubious of, until I discovered that Stanely mentions VAMPIRE’S KISS by name in at least two distinct interviews. The finished film mostly doesn’t pitch Cage at quite that level, but it’s definitely a weird performance. And not entirely to the movie’s benefit, in my estimation; he matches, in some ways, the charming eccentricities of the rest of the family, but Cage's now-expected eagerness for full-on mega-acting turns out to be sort of an unhelpful distraction here. It's not a bad performance (it was made worse by my audience, a bunch of hipster douchebags who appear to consider any line that Cage speaks in any movie, regardless of context, inherently hilarious) but it's noticeably a bit broader and more cartoony than the rest of the cast, who are not exactly going for underplayed minimalism either, but who keep their escalating madness a little more grounded and wind up equally impactful but more emotionally effective.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Cage, and you hire him for his mega-acting superpower, obviously. But I think Stanley should have kept a tighter leash on him in this case. It feels like Cage is trying to go over the top, rather than just responding naturally to the insane situation the movie puts him in. It’s an entertaining performance, and Cage is terrific with the script’s dark --but slightly goofy-- humor, but I worry he’s turning into a bit of a parody by this point in his career. Those dipshits laughing at every single thing he said are definitely morons, but I feel like he’s been encouraging them. Of course, this is also his first film in a long time which is actually good enough on its own merits that it becomes a problem when he tries to hijack it with his manic weirdness, rather than a saving grace. So I get where he’s coming from. Still, given how well Stanley does pushing the other actors to equally extreme but less excessive and silly psychological states, he might have been better off finding a normal actor and pushing them out of their comfort zone to go a little mega, as opposed to Cage, who by this point seems like he’s barely able to hold his craziness in check even before the plot starts to take a turn towards the weird.

Anyway, Cage’s performance is an illustrative example of where the movie starts to go a little wrong. Stanely, like Cage, seems maybe a little bit too eager to please for his own good, and towards the back half starts to overplay things a bit. It’s nothing derailing, just a few miscalculations: an eerie scene where the “color” affects a family member is diminished by adding an aggressive lightning strike where a subtle implication would have had more impact, for example. Or a surreal, otherworldly tableau is blown into a gaudy light show, pushing the movie’s special effects a little past their budget for no real advantage. It wouldn’t really be that big a deal –in fact, I’d usually commend a low-budget film like this overextending itself a little in the name of whammy—but the frustrating thing is that, for once, the movie doesn’t need it. It does such a fine job with its eerie insinuations and little glimpses that the more standard effects movie razzle-dazzle actually lessens the impact. The more concrete things get, the smaller the movie feels.

Still, all things considered it's kind of a miracle the movie works as well as it does. The hardest part –the inevitable visualization of Lovecraft's famously unseeable color-- is handled with a nifty effect, a kind of shifting, shimmering pink that looks suitably unnatural. The short story described the titular color as “shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum,” a pretty tall order for any primarily visual medium (even one with Yog-Sothoth rooting for it), but the flickering, ever-shifting character of the effect suggests, if not a never-before seen color, at least some kind of inexplicable visual phenomenon which is only partially perceptible to the human senses. What we see crucially suggests that there is much more we don’t see, which is a legitimately clever way to tackle this difficult problem with the adaptation, and is, overall, the guiding philosophy behind the whole movie’s strengths, and indeed, of the original story’s strengths, too. Of the dozens of Lovecraft adaptations I’ve seen, this is perhaps the only one that seems to really understand that, and that’s reason enough to be pleasantly surprised.

 It takes ambition to commit to capturing that kind of tone, and that ambition permeates the whole film. Stanley, who is surely more aware than almost any living director that whatever film he’s currently making might easily be his last, isn’t playing safe for a single second here. Not everything pays off (as I’ve said, at times the film might actually benefit from more restraint), but it’s kind of incredible how many dangerously unexpected choices --the stunt-casting of Tommy Chong, the weird pivot to body horror, the flirtation with psychedelia, filming in sunny, semi-tropical Portugal rather than the expected austere New England-- all somehow manage not just to keep from derailing the movie, but to actually strengthen it. All these disparate strengths don’t necessarily cohere into a unified, architecturally strong framework, though many of them do (the film’s pervasive oddball humor, for example, makes for an unexpectedly effective compliment to its lurking anxiety, rather than setting up the tonal clash one might expect), but strengths are strengths, and COLOR OUT OF SPACE has plenty of unexpected ones. Ol’ Richard Stanley might or might not be the great lost genre auteur his legendary rep has made him out to be, but on the strength of this movie, I’d say the possibility is still on the table. And that alone seemed about as impossible as non-Euclidian geometry and unknown colors a few weeks ago. Sometimes raising the elder gods turns out to be a better idea than you might think.

 *One obvious example would be that of Terrance Mallik, who was hailed as one of cinema’s untouchable geniuses during the 20-30 year hiatus between DAYS OF HEAVEN and his resumption of regular releases in the mid-2000s, only to find an increasingly skeptical critical establishment as his body of work grew.

** To be fair, he did do a short segment in the 2011 anthology film THE THEATRE BIZARRE, but it’s so brief (one of six segments in only 114 minutes) that it was hard to tell much from it. He’d also done two well-regarded documentaries –THE SECRET GLORY and THE WHITE DARKNESS in 2001 and and 2002—and gotten a couple screenplay credits in the intervening years. But still.

***

****IMDB trivia: “Director Richard Stanley and Swedish filmmaker Henrik Möller apparently performed a ritual to the Lovecraftian god Yog-Sothoth while in the Pyrénées to get the film made.” Probably not gonna find that one on Spielberg’s page.