Review by Andrew Swafford and Zach Dennis
Andrew: H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 story “The Colour Out of Space” is so perfectly suited for its original medium that it’s basically unfilmable. The premise – that a recently-crashed meteorite brings with it a color humans have never seen before – entirely resists cinematic depiction, as filmmakers can’t simply rely on their audience’s imagination to speculate about unimaginable visuals. So if you’re Richard Stanley, how do you engage Lovecraft fans if you can’t live up to that premise? You cast Nicholas Cage.
With the release of Mandy last year, we crossed the rubicon from the era of peak-memeified-Nicholas-Cage into the era of post-memeified-Nicholas-Cage. That film knew that meme-lords and film-bros everywhere wanted to see Nicholas Cage fight bikers wielding chainsaw swords and watch commercials about goblins vomiting mac and cheese and, most importantly, lose his mind. Cage is good at that, which theoretically makes him a good fit for a Lovecraft story, all of which tend to center on the dissolution of their protagonist’s sanity. And when Lovecraft does this, in his singular voice and with his incomprehensibly intricate vocabulary, it’s downright chilling. However, the Lovecraftian descent into madness can’t happen particularly organically with the film constantly trying to squeeze laughs out of its audience with incongruous hammy lines about Alpacas and zero-to-sixty outbursts from Cage. I can see the bones of a good Lovecraft movie here, space colors be damned, but it leans so heavily on pitching to the lowest common denominator that it never quite lives up to its promise.
Zach: Yeah, the casting of Cage really places this movie in a certain realm before the actual narrative can enter its own crazy realm. I did not read the story, but after watching this and getting a sense of the narrative, I think a greater sense of the unknown would have aided this. Casting Nicolas Cage immediately conjures up an expectation and that was to the detriment of this film, which never really settled for me.
Honestly, I came away feeling like this was more an episode of a modern anthology series like Black Mirror or Doctor Who rather than a feature-film version of a Lovecraft story. I’m not saying that as an insult to either series, but those are built on producing hour-long stories that fit that model, while this is a nearly two-hour long story that doesn’t quite work. I think this also speaks to the effects, which at times remind me of the early revival of Doctor Who, which lacked the funding it currently has.
Overall, I thought this was fine but think it’ll be destined for Shudder or Hulu. Outside the inability to really sell the unknown color, what did you make of the collective descent into madness with Cage’s family as someone who read the story?
Andrew: It’s just too immediate and tonally inconsistent to really feel convincing. The way that Lovecraft’s characters experience their descent into madness is (a) kept at a distance by the aloof narration and (b) actually gradual, to the point where you’re not quite sure how much of the mental disintegration is real and how much is projection at any given point. Here, we just have characters chopping their own fingers off and Nic Cage shouting outlandish things out of nowhere (as he is wont to do). The more I think about it, the more I feel convinced that Cage is the completely wrong choice and that this story is best kept on the page in the first place. It may very well be the case that extremely online Lovecraft stans also tend to be Nic Cage memelords (I’m guilty of enjoying Vampire’s Kiss myself), but do we really have to encourage that?