It should come as no surprise that Richard Stanley, the witchy and eccentric filmmaker behind Hardware, has delivered a truly mind-melting adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story. As the director himself has recounted many times, his mother used to read him to sleep with Lovecraft stories, which explains a lot. Stanley has a well-known appreciation of the cosmic and mystic, and that appreciation is on vibrant display in the trailer for Color Out Of Space. The film follows Nathan Gardner (a rather subdued Nicolas Cage) as he copes with the fallout from a mysterious meteorite that crash-lands on his family’s farm property. Nathan, his ailing wife (Joely Richardson), and their children are soon beset by an extraterrestrial life form that will inevitably draw comparisons to Annihilation—and not unfavorably, given that both films explore similar thematic territory.
But beyond the psychedelic surface, Color Out Of Space is actually a fascinating and deeply unnerving portrait of the dissolution of an American family unit, and our superficial preoccupations with the environment. To put it another way: yes, this movie shreds, but it also has some heavy concepts on its mind. And don’t worry—Cage definitely Cages-out. Color Out Of Space also stars Madeleine Arthur, Brendan Meyer, Julian Hilliard, Q’orianka Kilcher, and Tommy Chong, and hits theaters on January 24, 2020.