Colour Out Of Space (2020) - Movie Review

I want to try a little experiment before getting into the review proper. I want you to read the words in front of you. Not out loud. Just in your head. Read every. Single. Word.

As your eyes dart across this page, the words unravel inside your mind, turning ciphers on the screen into phrases and sentences that (hopefully) you are able to understand.

Now pay attention to the words as you’re reading them.

Listen to the voice inside your head that is reading them out.

Listen closely to it.

Is it your own voice? Perhaps.

Or maybe it isn’t.

Maybe it’s someone else’s.

Maybe it’s mine.

How does it feel to have my voice in your head?

How does it feel to know that I can reach out and plant myself inside your mind from halfway across the world?

Or maybe I’m not so far away after all.

Is that voice really inside your head?

Or can you hear it over your shoulder?

Okay, okay, let’s pull back a bit. What I likely completely screwed up with that little thought experiment was basically a long-winded way of explaining something that will be pertinent for the film I’m about to discuss: Some things work best on paper. If that little spiel was a short film, likely with in-film narration, the effect wouldn’t be the same as simply reading it. The best writers are able to bend and twist this two-dimensional plane and take advantage of the lack of audio-visual content to draw attention to certain things. Things that the mind, and the eyes connected to it, are unable to process. Things like the contents of the works of H.P. Lovecraft, a master when it comes to describing the indescribable, all in service to a mythology that details just how unprepared the human mind is for the sheer scope of the universe around it.

So, with all that in mind, this specific choice for adaptation, right from the off, feels like a bad idea. The rationale behind the title of the short story this is adapted from is that the Colour itself is unlike anything found on Earth. Or likely anywhere in human comprehension. It’s a microcosm for just how alien the realm of the Great Old Ones truly is, being something so far removed from what we understand as reality that our brains are unable to even process it. And in that confusion lies madness.

Considering this, it’s honestly a little lacklustre that said Colour turns out to be the same pinkish-purple melange that has basically become Spectrevision’s signature colour palette. It’s not something that translates well into the visual realm, the idea of a new colour never seen prior, and tangentially, it’s the same reason that The Giver worked better as a book than it did as a film. It doesn’t have the right ‘what the fuck am I even looking at?’ effect that should come packaged with a film tied to the Cthulhu Mythos.

There’s also how this is a serious slow-burner. Like, to the point where even when shit gets really strange, it still feels like it’s just build-up for something else to come. As adept as the actors are in their own specific types of reaction to the strangeness, especially Nicolas Cage who goes into full Vampire’s Kiss territory at times, the pacing is a little too languid for the story being told. Watching the Gardners each fall victim to the Colour, it honestly feels like this could be any garden-variety haunting and the results would be about the same.

But with that said… okay, this is where things are officially going to go off the rails, methinks, but the film still manages to work in spite of that. It may take quite a while to get going, but as it progresses further and further, all the little things shown on-screen start to form together. Even when it feels like not that much is going on, there’s still that feeling that a pile is forming in the cerebrum. And as things grow more chaotic, and the visuals start to lean into the warping of time and space that the Colour allows, it manages to regain that Lovecraftian effect. The Colour itself feels counter-intuitive for visual treatment, and yet as I type this, I find myself unable to even describe what this film looks like when it reaches the final reel.

This… this… I’m honestly starting to lose my wording on this one. It really is something that can only be experienced for one’s self. Yeah, there’s plenty of good acting, the tension is nicely handled, and in the modernisation of the text, it manages to nail some pretty solid environmentalist messaging into the cracks, but none of that truly explains what makes this film work. It’s the kind of film where you’d be forgiven for not thinking much of it in the moment, but as you walk away from whatever screen you’re viewing it from, the contents turn more and more brain-bending with every step. This is what pure Lovecraft cinema should look like, and if director/co-writer Richard Stanley’s ongoing comeback plan is to make a trilogy of these films (he’s apparently courting The Dunwich Horror for the next installment), then holy hell, am I on board to be rendered incoherent all over again.