15 Most Exciting Movies Coming In February 2020

The first Richard Stanley film in over 20 years, Color Out of Space has gained infamy at film festivals such as TIFF and LFF for its phantasmagorical photography, abundance of alpacas and an incredibly committed performance from Nicolas Cage. While the comparisons to another recent Cage film Mandy are justified on an aesthetic level, Color out of Space is a very different, fascinating beast of a film.

Unlike the majority of Nicolas Cage’s explosive descents into psychedelia, Color out of Space is very minimal and beautiful for the majority of its runtime. It details the lives of a family in the American countryside raising alpacas with quiet grace, giving insight and humour into their everyday existences and the intricate relationships each member has with another. Eventually, there are issues with the water, something that mutates their idyllic bliss, until everything becomes a nightmare of vivid colours, violence and inner corruption being torn out from the soul.

While this is a brilliant display for Cage’s warm kindness as a father and a relentless figure of destruction, it’s the general melancholy that really elevates the production. It feels sad and wistful whenever the family are experiencing psychological terror, like things didn’t have to be this way.