#diefarbe

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Color Out of Space is so good I just know someday it’ll be made into a great film. In the meantime, the low-budget German production of Die Farbe/The Color will hold us over. It translates the story from paper to the screen well and makes some creative choices along the way. Some of the decisions are not ones I would’ve made but there’s good suspense and a few moments that are genuinely and satisfyingly unsettling.

Jonathan (Ingo Heise) is looking for his father, who disappeared in a small town in Germany, where years ago a meteorite made of an unknown substance crashed one night. Inside was a strange substance of a color no one had ever seen that began affecting the nearby people, animals, and vegetation in unexplainable and unnerving ways.

Part of what makes this film and the original story so unnerving and effective is its premise. it's not an alien virus, being, or weapon, it's far more otherworldly than that; it's a color. How do you fight back against a color that spreads? What could a color even do? The more you learn, the stranger and more unsettling its ideas become.

This is a story that's inherently difficult to translate, as the "monster" is something that can't be described. Writer/director Huan Vu's solution is so elegant you'd be hard-pressed to find a better one. The entire film is shot in black-and-white. When we see the titular color, it's a patch of actual color. It isn’t actually something you’ve never seen, but the point is made. It looks and feels alien. It's so well done I want aspiring filmmakers to see Die Farbe so they can be inspired, so they can expand their idea of how to use the visual medium of film to convey what an alien, supernatural, or otherworldly threat could be.

What prevents The Color from being the end-all, be-all adaptation is the technical issues. The performances are only ok. Combined with some dubious special effects and the film is unmistakenly low-budget. That can be forgiven, but the story is also slow - at least until the narrator reveals the magnitude of the horror taking place. Trimming some of the lingering shots and replacing them with scenes of the soon-to-be affected people and their descent into delirium would’ve greatly improved the film… but it’s also possible the performers simply weren’t up to the task.

Many of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories deal with such a unique brand of horror that translating them to a visual medium is impossible. At least it feels that way until you’ve seen The Color. While not perfect, it’s ambitious, faithful to the material, and will make you fidget in your seat the way the story should. One day, this adaptation will be eclipsed by another. Until then, watch all the way until the end of The Color, past the credits to get the full story. (Original German with English Subtitles, On Blu-ray, January 12, 2018)