Color Out of Space(2020)

Plot Summary

• In the wake of his wife Theresa's mastectomy, Nathan Gardner moves his family, including children Lavinia, Benny, and Jack, to his late father's farm. One night, a brilliantly glowing meteor crash-lands in their front yard, briefly traumatizing Jack. The next morning, hydrologist Ward Phillips, who is surveying the area for a dam development, along with the mayor and the sheriff of the nearby town of Arkham, arrive to see the meteor. That night, Nathan and Lavinia witness the meteor being struck by several bolts of lightning.Ward notices that the groundwater has taken on an oily sheen and tests it. When his test strips begin to glow brightly with the Color, he advises the Gardners not to drink it. While notifying nearby resident Ezra of the contamination, he is shown a recording of sounds of unknown origin sounding beneath Ezra's house at night. Meanwhile, Jack becomes fixated on the property's well, observing strange plant growths and insects, as well as claiming to communicate with a 'friend' inside the well. A news crew arrives to interview Nathan about the meteor, but finds that it has vanished.Later, while Theresa is preparing dinner, she absentmindedly cuts off two of her fingers. As Nathan rushes her to the hospital, he leaves Benny in charge. On Nathan's request, Benny goes outside to put the farm's alpacas back in their stables, but does not return until late at night, claiming time had passed instantaneously for him. Meanwhile, Lavinia attempts multiple times to contact Nathan, but they are unable to hear each other through the phone. Upon the parents' return, Nathan lashes out at Benny and Lavinia with uncharacteristic rage.Later, Nathan becomes frustrated after finding that his most recent harvest of fruits has proven inedible, and Theresa snaps after losing a work client due to the faltering Internet connection, bringing the two to a fight. The same night, Lavinia tries to perform a Wiccan ceremony to save her family, mutilating herself in the process. Theresa suddenly hears Jack and Benny screaming after entering the alpaca stables and rushes to their aid, but in the process, a bolt of Color fuses Theresa and Jack together into a deranged mass. Unable to start the car or call for help as all electronic devices have stopped functioning, and upon discovering sunlight harms Theresa and Jack, Nathan and the children carry them into the attic. Benny reveals that he had witnessed the alpacas after a horrible mutation due to the Color. Nathan decides to euthanize the alpacas with a shotgun after finding they have similarly fused together. Beginning to lose his sanity, Nathan also attempts to euthanize Theresa and Jack but is unable to bring himself to.Lavinia and Benny conspire to leave the farm using Lavinia's horse, but it runs from the property. Before returning inside, Benny insists he hears the family's dog inside the well, but upon climbing in, he is assimilated by the Color. Nathan displays more uncharacteristic rage and locks Lavinia in the attic with Theresa and Jack, who have turned to aggression. Ward and the sheriff are brought to the farm after a nearby resident discovers a fused mass of animals, and arrive just in time to break into the attic. Nathan shoots and kills the monster, saving Lavinia.After rushing outside, Nathan attempts to shoot the Color emerging from the well, but the sheriff mistakes Nathan's aim for Ward and fatally shoots him. Ward and the sheriff leave to evacuate Ezra, and Lavinia insists on staying with Nathan. At Ezra's house, the pair only find his desiccated corpse and a recording he left behind, where he surmises that the Color is attempting to remake Earth into "something it knows." Heading back towards the farmhouse, a mutated living tree kills the sheriff.Ward returns to rescue Lavinia, but finds her possessed by the Color, which explodes out of the well and forms a funnel into the sky. Ward is shown a vision of where the Color hails from, an exoplanet inhabited by tentacled alien entities, before Lavinia disintegrates. As space and time begin to unravel, Ward enters the farmhouse and is pursued by a murderous apparition of Nathan. He hides in the wine cellar as the Color's distortion of reality drives the property to destruction, leaving Ward the only survivor as he climbs out of the farmhouse's colorless debris.In an epilogue, a traumatized Ward stands on top of the finished dam which covers the former property, and narrates that having witnessed the Color's takeover, he will never drink the dam's water.

Storyline

• A story of cosmic terror about The Gardners, a family who moves to a remote farmstead in rural New England to escape the hustle of the 21st century. They are busy adapting to their new life when a meteorite crashes into their front yard. The mysterious aerolite seems to melt into the earth, infecting both the land and the properties of space-time with a strange, otherworldly color. To their horror, the Gardner family discover that this alien force is gradually mutating every life form that it touches...including them. When an iridescent meteorite plummets from outer space and into the property and foundations of a remote New England estate, a malignant force begins to insidiously permeate the lives of an unassuming family. The effects are gradual - time begins to dilate, nature assumes an otherworldly hue - and all things bright and beautiful eventually mutate and corrupt under its influence. So proceeds this eerie adaptation of the short story by H.P. Lovecraft, one of horror's most haunting, here presented by the enigmatic South African filmmaker Richard Stanley. Returning to Midnight Madness 29 years after his hypnotic killer-robot fandango Hardware first premiered in the section, Stanley summons his uniquely hallucinogenic sensibilities to envelope his endearing characters in surreal, incremental dread. At first, their domestic bliss is quietly fraught with an undercurrent of unnerving tension, before eventually boiling over into delirious, acid-fueled terror. The patriarch of this doomed brood is none other than Nicolas Cage, continuing his recent renaissance as a midnight-movie staple with an increasingly unhinged performance that reliably ricochets among every technique in the Stanislavski playbook. The rest of the ensemble, which includes Joely Richardson and Tommy Chong, play effective foils to Cage's delirium, but the real star of the show is the alien entity itself. This all-consuming, dispassionate menace manifests itself in a series of grotesque, body-horror, and psychedelic spectacles, worthy of its ineffable literary origins. — Toronto International Film Festival After a meteorite lands in the front yard of their farm, Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) and his family find themselves battling a mutant extraterrestrial organism as it infects their minds and bodies, transforming their quiet rural life into a technicolor nightmare. — RLJE Films In the lands west to Arkham (New England) lives the Gardner family: father Nathan, mother Theresa, older brother Benny, middle sister Lavinia and little child Jack. Fulfilling the first year of the moving to Nathan's family house from the city and six months of Theresa's mastectomy to heal her cancer, Lavinia feels her life struck trapped in the middle of nowhere. Fan lover of Wiccan witchcraft, the same day that she makes a ritual hoping back to the city she meets Ward Phillips, a young hydrologist sent to test the healthiness of the water in the zone. This night, a meteorite falls close to the house, causing a great shock and illuminating everything with a strange color. Looking for help, Nathan calls Mayor Tooma and Sheriff Pierce with unsuccessful results, but Ward appears and interests about it, accepting Nathan's advice to meet Ezra, the old hippie who lives close to them. However, the Gardner's family life turns soon in a nightmare: Nathan's body start to be infected by the arms and absent-minded Theresa cuts herself two fingers while she was cutting carrots to dinner. While Nathan takes Theresa to the hospital, the other three feel the corrupt influence of the meteorite: Jack obsesses with "the man in the well" that he hears all the time, Benny experiments memory losses by time dilation and Lavinia feels her own body ill. At the same time, animals and plants in the vicinity mutate by the contact bathed with the color. But when Nathan and Theresa return from the hospital, horror takes over Gardners: a wave of color hit Jack and Theresa to transform them in an unspeakable being. While Ward tries to save Gardners and specially Lavinia, situation gets out-of-control by a deranged Nathan. With time against him, can will Ward find the way to save the day before color destroy everything in its path? — Chockys