squalid home, leeching off the wealth of others
— but so, too, are the Parks, a family rendered
infantile and helpless by their fortune, unable
to complete basic tasks without enlisting
working-class servants to refine their lives.
Baked into this theme of inequality is the
ambiguity of it all. There are no villains here.
The rich Park family are obnoxious, but
ultimately nice — though, as the Kim
matriarch notes with a poisonous tone,
“They’re nicebecausethey’re rich.” The poor
Kim family are liars, scoundrels, and
criminals, if you wanted to get technical about
it — yet they’re essentially only conning their
way into menial working-class jobs. It’s not
exactly the kind of take Danny Ocean would
go for. They’re just doing what they can to
survive. If there’s a villain here, it’s capitalism,
and the structures that force people into
indignity, desperation and naked self-interest.
With a typical tonal rollercoaster, Bong gives
the film an extraordinary bittersweet ending,
offering sun-dappled hope as quickly as it
offers a tangy note of downbeat, realist
cynicism, and one that forces us to confront
where we sit in the upstairs-downstairs riddle.
But talk of capitalist allegories and social
commentary should not detract from just how
insanely entertaining this film is. It is hard
not to watch it rapt and gobsmacked, your jaw
permanently near the floor. The script was
written for the theatre but the experience
feels like it should only be had in a packed
cinema, where the crowd reactions will play as
importantly as anything happening on screen.
Even in its later, more melancholy moments,
it is never anything less than utterly
compelling.Parasitesomehow manages to
scratch every cinematic itch you have and
offers more up you didn’t know you had.
Frankly, it’s everything you want from a film.
And it’s oneyouwon’t be able to stop talking
about.JOHN NUGENT
ON SCREEN
VERDICT A miracle of a fi lm. It feels like
Bong Joon-ho’s already extraordinary
career has been building to this: a riotous
social satire that’s as gloriously entertaining
as it is deeply sardonic.
ADAPTING THE ELDRITCH works of H.P.
Lovecraft, the early 20th century writer who
specialised in upsetting tales of cosmic horror,
is no easy task. For one thing, you’ve got the
job of bringing to the screen sights and
sounds which Lovecraft himself claimed were
impossible to imagine. “Quite beyond the
power of words to classify,” he summarised,
unhelpfully, of sinister paintings in Pickman’s
Model. In 1927 short story The Color Out Of
Space, meanwhile, he memorably says of a
woodchuck: “Its face had taken on an expression
which no-one ever saw in a woodchuck before.”
The mind boggles.
There have been loose adaptations of the
latter in the 93 years since its publication,
and now arrives another. It takes someone as
brave as Richard Stanley, the fi lmmaker who
infamously wrangled H.G. Wells’ The Island Of
Dr. Moreau onto celluloid in the ’90s, to tackle
such a task. And it’s a valiant eff ort, though
surely destined to send many running from
the cinema. Color Out Of Space is full-strengthstuff , even if it perhaps inevitably loses
something in fi rming up the novelist’s abstract
notions. That titular colour, never-before-
seen on Earth and capable of draining people’s
sanity, on screen turns out to be a rather lovely
shade of pink.
It’s essentially the tale of a family subjected
to an intense alien force that makes them go
cuckoo. But even in the early stages of the story,
when all is meant to be fi ne, Stanley can’t resist
piling on the weirdness. The patriarch is an alpaca
farmer, who enjoys drinking milk warm from
the teat. He’s also played by Nicolas Cage. “The
animal of the future!” he drawls early on, hardly
a textbook man of the land. Tommy Chong
plays the family’s “squire”, a whacked-out
stoner with a cat named G Spot. The daughter,
meanwhile, is a witch, introduced mid-ritual;
this fact has no bearing whatsoever on later
events. The sum eff ect of all of this is to make
the subsequent craziness, after the meteor
actually hits, less impactful.
That said, there’s plenty here for horror
hounds to enjoy. There’s not a huge amount of
plot, as such, just an intensifying sense of dread,
as the light shows get ever trippier and Stanley
conjures some truly repulsive sights. It would
be wrong to ruin these, but suffi ce to say that
fans of slimy body horror, nightmarish
dragonfl ies and mutant tomatoes will leave
feeling sated. Frankly, the pile-up of terrors
becomes exhausting before the end — the
narrative deliberately devolves into chaos, with
the neon fog seemingly infecting even the fi lm’s
script — but one has to hand it to Stanley for
managing to get such a pure vision of bedlam
onto the screen. Whatever is said about Color
Out Of Space, nobody can accuse it of being a
watered-down stab at Lovecraft — even without
a terrifying woodchuck. NICK DE SEMLYENVERDICT It’s not as effective as Mandy or
The Mist, both of which it evokes at points. But
Color Out Of Space is still an audacious and
admirably out-there attempt at cosmic horror.COLOR OUT OF SPACE
DIRECTOR Richard Stanley
CAST Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Tommy
Chong, Madeleine Arthur, Q’orianka KilcherPLOT In the rural town of Arkham, Massachusetts,
a city man-turned-farmer (Cage), his fi nancial-
advisor wife (Richardson) and their two children
are starting a new life. Then a mysterious meteor
hits their land, unearthly lights begin to wreak
havoc on them and their animals, and they get
a very different kind of bright future to the one
they had in mind.OUT NOW
★★★ CERT MA15+ / 108 MINSMaybe ‘Vivid Cool’
was a bit too much.[FILM]
Above: Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong as the gullible
Parks. Below left: Er...we’ll pass on checking out their
Instagram pages.