Color Out of Space

The Gardner family — Nathan, his recuperating wife Theresa, and their three children — have relocated to a remote New England farmstead, trying to start fresh. Nathan is raising alpacas with unconvincing optimism. Theresa is recovering from breast cancer. Their teenage daughter Lavinia practices Wicca by the well at night, appealing to forces she doesn't fully understand.

A meteorite crashes into the front yard. It glows an impossible color — magenta-pink, a shade that doesn't exist in the visible spectrum — and dissolves into the soil by morning. Almost immediately, the plants grow wrong. The animals behave strangely. The youngest child Jack fixates on something in the well. The family begins to sleep poorly, then think poorly, then not themselves at all.

The alien color is not a creature so much as a presence — an infection from somewhere outside human understanding, working through soil and water and the bodies of whatever it finds. Theresa and Jack are its most visible victims: the two fuse together in a scene of sustained body horror, a living amalgamation that continues to speak, feel, and suffer. Nathan's deterioration is louder — Nicolas Cage unraveling in increments, then all at once.

Ward Phillips, a hydrologist surveying the water supply, watches the farm come apart from the outside. The alpacas mutate into grotesque hybrid shapes. The entity gestates in the well. In the film's final act, the color fully emerges and ascends — consuming the farmhouse and most of what remains of the Gardners. Ward escapes. The farm is gone. Whatever came from space is gone too. It left nothing behind that looks like what it found.