Richard Stanley has not directed a film since the thunder flop The Island of Dr Moreau (1996), a movie that Stanley was also fired from before production was completed.

The HP Lovecraft adaptation Color out of space - about an alien force poisoning an entire city with its purple shimmer - is a huge comeback for Stanley. It has already found its audience among genre film fans at film festivals and received fine reviews. Fortunately, the reactions are not just due to nostalgia or the fact that Nicolas Cage flips in the classic Nicolas Cage way (it is now mandatory).

Color out of space shows that Stanley's aesthetics have aged like fine wine. Just as in his cult-declared Hardware (1990), a post-apocalyptic cyberpunk thriller about a murderous robot, Stanley lets the mood build up slowly.

We get to know the Gardner family who live out on the vista. Mother Theresa stresses herself over her buying and selling on the stock exchange which she manages remotely. Elder son Benny smokes most with a neighbor hippie, while daughter Lavinia performs rituals according to a new age belief in witchcraft. The youngest son Jack, of course, is the eye-stone of Dad Nathan (Cage), a failed artist who saddled over to gardeners.

According to the daughter, "dad took too much acid in the hippie era," which would explain a strange investment in alpaca camels that Nathan claims is "the animal of the future." Soon, the family's existence also turns into a metaphysical slant.

Gardners have their problems. Mom and dad, for example, have also stopped lying, but when they are together as a unit it is still a house full of love.

Soon a meteorite crashes on the site. The stone from space has carried with it an extraterrestrial force, a purple shimmer that pollutes the water. Soon, strange flowers start to grow, the animals mutate into monsters and people go crazy. Ward Phillips is a controller from the water treatment plant that acts as a storyteller, and is also involved in the psychedelic nightmare.

Color out of space is an adaptation of the dread master HP Lovecraft's short novel of the same name from 1927, and Richard Stanley manages Lovecraft's darkness well. The care in the small intimate family moments makes the extraterrestrial indifference to human life become extra insulting.

The shimmer affects nature, the dog runs away and the alpacas transform. But the real horror lies in how family love slowly begins to tear apart, or rather mutate beyond the flesh. Mutual courtesy disappears or is corrupted, and everyone's emotional life seems to be governed by forces beyond all understanding and science.

Like the Lovecraft-inspired sci-fi horror event Horizon, the meteorite seems to have opened a portal to a black hole, but this time with a purple cloud of smoke that brings people together and allows them to absorb each other (see the movie if you want to understand what I mean ).

The story ties in with the feeling that little life can be crushed at any time by unknown powers beyond our world. Color out of space is a great way to get rid of that fear in a controlled environment.