Color Out of Space

Nicolas Cage, alpacas, and a colour that does not exist. More faithful than most attempts and the closest anybody has come.

A meteorite lands in the front garden of a New England farm. The water changes. The plants change. The animals change first and the family does not notice.

Richard Stanley had not directed a feature since being fired from The Island of Dr Moreau in 1996, and the return is a good one: he lets the colour be a magenta that the film treats as wrong rather than pretty, and the effects escalate from unsettling to deeply upsetting.

The Lovecraft problem is that the entity must be indescribable and cinema shows things. Stanley's answer is to never explain it, never give it intent, and let it simply be a process.

The alpaca sequence is the one people cannot forget. Cage's performance is calibrated exactly as broadly as the material needs.