Color out of Space: Neon NZ Film Review

Nicolas Cage goes uncaged in Richard Stanley's adaptation of HP Lovecraft's short story.

Cage is Nathan Gardener, who moves his entire family to a rural farm after his wife's breast cancer treatment. His two children are slowly and begrudgingly adjusting, his wife is fighting to stay in business and he's invested in a herd of alpacas.

One night, a mysterious noise in the sky bathes everything in purple, and the Gardeners' lives are changed forever as what dwells within the meteorite starts to poison their world.

Color Out Of Space may be rich in atmosphere, but it's light on character and coherence.

Certainly Stanley puts together a film that uses its colours to otherworldly effect, and its temperament to ethereal. The blurring of the visual lines and the use of colour cues is trippy to endure - but what goes on within the confines of the characters is what detracts.

Underwriting for the Gardeners doesn't help - and certainly when Cage starts to go unhinged, it draws attention away from the film and seems to simply exist to service fan desires. Sure, there's an undercurrent of the rot infecting the family as much as the out-of-space rot infecting the land, but it's barely expanded upon.

Extraneous characters pop up simply to drop exposition and then move out; there's a distinct lack of narrative coherence here that flounders parts of Color Out Of Space and ground it sorely in frustrating territory.

However, the atmospherics help ease out the unevenness that exists within - and while the film's certainly flawed, it brings on the feeling of dread with both competence and the sensation of dropping LSD.