Colour Out Of Space

Drag Me To Well

Colour Out Of Space
(aka Color Out Of Space)
Portugal/USA 2019 Directed by Richard Stanley
Screening at the London Film Festival 8th October 2019

Okay, so the sixth and final film of my London Film Festival experience this year was also a treat, in the form of a new H. P. Lovecraft adaptation. Now, I’ve always had a soft spot for Lovecraft but he’s a hard writer to get up on screen. Mostly, I suspect, because the majority of what he wrote used the short story form so it’s hard to expand out into a feature anyway. Also, Lovecraft’s preoccupation of describing ancient, ‘nameless’ horrors or alluding to the unspeakable things which happen rather than actually giving you full descriptions... the literary equivalent of hiding your monsters in the shadows so nobody can see how bad your creature costume is... doesn’t help potential film-makers when it comes to trying to adapt his stuff. I do, however, tend to enjoy a certain amount of what passes for ‘screen Lovecraft’. I could happily rewatch Die, Monster, Die, a 1965 attempt at bringing The Colour Out Of Space to the screen and I was even tolerant when they insisted on presenting one of his key stories, The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward, as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace... I still don’t know how they got away with that one, though.

So, yeah, I was chomping at the bit to see this new movie but not, necessarily, because it was based on Lovecraft (although that was always going to be one of the plus points) but because this was the triumphant return... and having seen the film I can certainly confirm it is ‘full on triumphant’... of much loved director Richard Stanley. I loved his movies ‘back in the day’ when he directed Hardware and Dust Devil but, it appears that this is the first feature film he’s attempted to make since, by my reckoning, 1992. I’ve seen a few shorts and documentaries by him since then but he’s been hiding in the shadows for a while now due to various reasons, some of them personal, and now somebody has let him have another proper crack at making a low budget feature and... well, good idea. I just wanted to see it regardless because I know how special his first two films are.

So I was delighted to be in attendance at one of the two screenings that Colour Out Of Space got at the London Film Festival this year and even more happy that the great man was in attendance himself, to give an intro to the movie and then get into a question and answer session with the audience afterwards. He’s got one of those hypnotic voices I always find so easy to listen to for long periods of time which, in a way, is just as well because he is a bit of a talker.

So anyway, based on a work by Lovecraft, a writer who Stanley said in the Q & A that his mother got him into at the age of seven, Colour Out Of Space stars Nicholas Cage as Nathan, the head of a secluded homestead in New Orleans where he keeps a farm of tomatoes and alpacas and lives with his wife Thereza, played by Joely Richardson and his three children Benny (played by Brendan Meyer), young Jack (played by Julian Hilliard) and Lavinia (played by Madeleine Arthur).

The film is re-set in modern times but as the film’s ‘outsider’ character, a water surveyor played by Elliot Knight, walks into the forest and finds Lavinia, she is dressed in antiquated looking clothes and standing by her horse as she is trying to ‘summon up a spell’. It’s a lovely opening actually because, it’s not until Knight walks in on her and you can see him wearing modern clothes, that you are able to get a better time fix on the thing. It’s almost like you are looking at something which Roger Corman might have made in the mid-1960s for a minute. Knight’s character is called Ward Phillips which is, of course, a shortening of the original writer’s first two initials, Howard Philips.

Actually, the film is absolutely cluttered with allusions to the life and literature of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, with references to Dunwich and Arkham and all kinds of things. It didn’t bother me too much though because this production is so well put together. I was a little disappointed, truth be told, that the Necronomicon, the fictitious, extremely rare and demonic tome mentioned in many a Lovecraft tale... and quite a few other tales in both literature and film over the years... was reduced to being a small paperback volume in this. I got over it fairly quickly though. There are also a fair few references, I think, to the previous films of Richard Stanley ‘hidden in plain sight’ on occasion, such as the graffiti scrawled on the eldest son’s bedroom wall stating that... “No Flesh Shall Be Spared”... which is, of course, a reference to Hardware.

The film is... and this really isn’t surprising given as it’s Lovecraft... not entirely faithful to the original Lovecraft short. This is a movie and demands changes to be able to pass into this format, especially in a world where every film pretty much has to strive to be commercially popular now. However, unlike a fair few adaptations of the writer’s works, it is actually quite faithful in its own ways to the spirit and basic plot points of the thing. So yes, there are alpacas and crazy, almost Gigeresque... perhaps I should say Cthulhuesque in this case... monsters but various key points are put in place and faithfully maintained to anchor the film firmly in the source material quite overtly and positively so. In terms of modern adaptation, it holds up quite well. I was surprised when I heard the astonishingly low budget for this film too (around 6 million dollars) since it looks way more expensive, I think, than what it was actually put together for.

Beautiful shot set ups, of course, as you would expect form Stanley and the colours are, absolutely wonderful. There’s some nice purples in there. It probably doesn’t help matters for potential directors that, if memory recalls (it’s been at least ten years since I read this and probably twenty more before that even), the ‘colour’ out of space is an alien colour which has no equivalent on Earth so, given the challenge of an impossible colour palette to work around, I think the director here does pretty amazingly well.

I’m not going to say much about the story beats on this one... the meteor, the well etc... because you know, pretty much (and Mr. Stanley said this himself in his Q&A session, after pointing out the difficulties of adapting Lovecraft for the screen) that as far as human characters go it’s almost always going to end in either madness or death (usually both). There is, in fact, a last person standing moment in the film but I think this is very much in keeping with the original short and the nice ‘absence of colour’ in certain parts of the end sequence was also nicely done and enough to distract me on a visual level anyway.

If I had any criticisms of the film then I think, purely going on this first viewing, that things maybe do get a bit over the top towards the end... not in terms of content but in what they ‘show’ of the content. Of course, you expect that of a Nicolas Cage film now anyway but I was amused to hear Mr. Stanley saying, after the film had finished, that Cage “isn’t nearly as crazy as people think he is”. I always suspected as much but, of course, coming from a director as delightfully crazy as Richard Stanley anyway, I’m not 100% sure that’s a stirling endorsement.

Another slight criticism would be the title, which on the print I saw (even though I saw it in rainy England), was written as Color Out Of Space, in the American spelling. However, I did notice that the spelling was written in the English manner on the credit which read something along the lines of... based on the short story The Colour Out Of Space by H. P. Lovecraft... so that kind of mollified me a little. As did the appearance of Tommy Chong in the movie.

Oh... I almost forgot to mention the score by Colin Stetson, which I thought was pretty good. It does call attention to itself in various scenes but I don’t see anything wrong with that and it does well to help maintain a level of unease and strangeness to the proceedings. It’s a nice scene setter too, with the breathtaking opening shots of the surrounding forest before the meteor crashes down made somehow eerie by Stetson’s, almost ‘new age’ moments within the score. I’d grab this one quickly if only the thing was out on a nice CD.

And that’s me pretty much done with Colour Out Of Space and I can’t wait until this thing comes out on Blu Ray (hopefully sooner rather than later). It was a thrill to see a film I’d been really looking forward to more than most others this year and a very special cherry on top of the icing to actually get to see Richard Stanley ‘in the flesh’, as it were.

And that’s also me done with the London Film Festival this year. I’ve seen some truly remarkable films this time around and I had a great time with all of them. Looking forward, now, to the next festival I have tickets for... which is the mini FrightFest Halloween all dayer event at the start of November. Hopefully my ‘film stamina’ will prove its worth as I try and survive from 10am in the morning until 12.30am the next morning, devouring various new horror movies as they flash before my eyes. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed my coverage of the films I saw at this year’s London Film Festival and normal review service of three a week should resume very shortly, with two new cinema releases up next, fingers crossed. Thanks for reading.

The OA

Far and OA

The OA
By Zal Batmanglij & Brit Marling
2016 USA

I’ve talked about actress Brit Marling before on this blog, both in her co-creative role with Zal Batmanglij and in her work with various other people, in some amazing films such as Sound Of My Voice (reviewed here), The East (reviewed here), Another Earth (reviewed here) and I Origins (reviewed here). I’ve quickly become hooked on the kind of work she and the performers/people behind the cameras that she works with does in movies and so, when I heard that she and Zal had co-created a TV series together, I got kind of excited and desperately wanted to see it. Alas, regular readers will know I’m not fan of streaming channel specific media and the kind of exclusivity that comes with it to subscribers so it looked like I wasn’t going to get a chance to see this one. Luckily, a friend gave me a way of seeing this and I was, once again, blown away by the kind of work this actress gets involved with.

Now, this is going to be a very tricky series to write about... partially because Batmanglij and Marling are about promoting the world of ideas and cultivating it in the collective mind of their audience, rather than presenting a standard kind of narrative which quickly crosses t’s, dots i’s and generally explains all there is to be found in a way that’s specific to a creator. Rather, they take some ideas, run with them and have an uncanny knack of getting you to ask questions about what you are being presented with and then leaving things for you to ponder on and draw your own conclusions from. That’s often the most powerful kind of evocative cinematic experience a writer/director can gift you with and, I have to say, The OA is one of the few television series’ I’ve seen which manages to do just that.

The other reason it’s a tricky thing to write about is because I really don’t want to give you any spoilers here. In fact, I’m not even going to tell you what The OA actually means or stands for. You have to find that out for yourself as you go on this, quite compelling journey of a TV show. So, yeah, I’m sorry if this is a short review but I don’t want to say too much about it. What I will do, though, is give you the basic plot set up so you can make your mind up as to whether you want to see this. So, I'm flagging a very slight and small spoiler from the first episode here although, frankly, I think knowing the start of the basic premise is just going to make you want to watch this one even more. So, if you want to know nothing about the plot at all... just skip this next paragraph.

The story starts at a point in the present when a dishevelled Prairie Johnson (played by Brit Marling) is seen running through traffic on a crowded bridge and jumping into the waters below. She is fished out and she has somehow survived this. Her parents (played by Scott Wilson and Alice Krige) are informed that she is at a hospital, declaring her real name is The OA. Prairie has been missing for around eight years and her parents are anxious to see her. Here’s the kicker though. When they get to the hospital to visit her, Prairie is asking the doctors and nurses surrounding her who these two people are. It’s okay though, explains her father to those assembled, it’s just that she’s never actually seen us before. It turns out, you see, that before Prairie went missing... she was totally blind. Not any more though.

And if that’s not an intriguing start to a story then, I don’t know what is.

Don’t want to say too much more about the narrative other than it tells a lot of things in flashback and then crosscuts to what is happening to Prairie in the present, as she struggles to not tell the FBI too much about what’s happened to her in the last eight years. Instead, she tells what’s happened slowly, night by night as the series progresses, to a bunch of five misfits who are finding a place to belong with her, in some ways. They are played by Patrick Gibson, Phyllis Smith, Brendan Meyer, Brandon Perea and Ian Alexander and, true, some of these characters are a little like walking clichés but I think that’s kind of deliberate because it helps provide something familiar to the audience to help sweeten the pill of some of the truly wild turnings this show goes down as Prairie tells her story. And clichéd or not, they’re very much 3D characters, for the most part and, as you’d expect from this creative team... they’ve picked some really great actors for these parts. Oh... and Jason Isaacs has an important role to play here too but... yeah, can’t really tell you what if I want to remain relatively spoiler free here.

The series, like the films I mentioned above, is not a thrill a minute ride which will have you speeding along with it. Instead it does things at its own pace and takes its time to pull you in while slowly putting little layers of background information in place about the various characters. And as it does so, it pushes you into the slow moving but inexorable creative current that runs through the centre of the story and doesn’t let you go until you’re ejected. Also, it doesn’t, like nearly all formula television, feel bound to a consistent running time from episode to episode. Instead, like the chapters in a book (and I think it might have been Batmanglij who made this point in an interview), each episode finds its own perfect running time for the information it wants to convey. So some episodes may run for over an hour whereas, one particular episode, only lasts little over a half an hour. One episode might have the opening credits near the start... another may not start on them until almost at the end of the show. It feels weird at times but it does the job so I really couldn’t complain about this.

The story does build to a kind of natural conclusion but one which leaves many things unanswered... as you will be expecting by the time you get there... although it also has a brilliant kind of double stance on the way things play out. The last episode does kinda pull the rug out from under the audience (and some of the other characters too) while also giving you something which slips that rug right back under your feet again, depending on how your brain decodes the art in front of you. Something which I suspect will get redefined a little anyway during the second series, which I believe was released last week (don’t know if I’ll get to see it though).

Not much more to say on The OA for now, other than it has some nice musical moments and some truly spectacular special effects sequences at times. One of the best shows on TV of recent years, for sure and that’s something I’d totally expect when I see Britt Marling’s name connected to something. Certainly a hard recommend from me if you are, unlike myself, someone who watches a lot of TV rather than film. And definitely something I’d say hunt out if you’re a film fan too, while I think of it. Don’t miss out on this one.