User Reviews

First I just want to say I love the choice to make the movie black and white so The Color stands out. The story is great and overall pretty close to the original short story. It's cool and creepy seeing how everything progresses on the farm, everyone slowly going mad. However the ending is a bit underwhelming, the acting can be cheesy at times, and the American soldiers accents at the end are laughably fake. Overall it's still pretty good.

I had heard of this film, but had dismissed it, pretty much because after seeing DIE MONSTER DIE, and THE CURSE, I had decided I was done with "Colour Out of Space" knock-offs. They're nearly as bad as the "Lurking Fear" knock-offs.

A friend I trust strongly recommended it to me, and so I bought a copy. I am so glad.

DIE FARBE is in black and white, and it is a period piece. It takes place in three time periods – 1975, the 1930s, and finally 1945. The film-makers moved the action to Germany (where they are located), and World War II is referenced, but they did not make the mistake of having the war be the central topic.

DIE FARBE is well worth seeing for any Lovecraft fan. One clever touch they achieved was that the only color in the movie is THE Colour, if you get my meaning, but even here they are very subtle. The first few times the Colour shows up it is pale, and easy to miss or (more likely) to leave you uncertain you saw anything.

WHY DIE FARBE RULES The movie doesn't follow the stale Hollywood 3-act plot sequence (apparently it is taught in school nowadays, mentally shackling new generations of would-be screenwriters). Instead, the movie simply builds up a more and more ominous mood until finally horror comes to fruition.

The film also doesn't follow the execrable trope of trying to explain everything either before or after the fact. It just lets the events unfold, yet remain inexplicable. Of course, this leads to confusion for spoon-fed viewers. But after all the whole point to the Colour is that we cannot understand it – it is an entity so alien that the only way it can interact with us is to feed.

The sets and cinematography were excellent, in my opinion. The actors were decent, though not not world-beaters. Sometimes the film is a little slow, but that is the nature of a mood-piece. I was certainly never bored.

WHY DIE FARBE DROOLS Well, it doesn't really drool. But it has a very few minor weaknesses. One is the fact that the supposedly all-American protagonist early in the film speaks English with a strong German accent. I sympathize with the film-makers. Given that he was the guy they wanted, they were stuck with his non-American nature I guess.

I still liked the show though. That minor false step didn't ruin it. Check it out.

Very spooky, slow. Based on a Lovecraft story.

The trigger event has a meteorite landing and exhibiting inscrutable properties, diffusing into the air. It is the remnants of a craft. German scientists from the 30s — one of our most enduring stereotypes — cannot figure it out, but before it disappears, they make the mistake of breaking the sphere embedded within. A colored goo is released and joins the water.

A nearby farm family with three boys come under the influence of this 'color,' and it is this deterioration that we see in our spooky parts. The film is in black and white, effectively using devices that evoke the silent era. The goo is rendered in color when we see it and that worked less well for me.

The narrative structure is what sets this apart. It has story in three periods. The focus is the appearance of the goo and over a year the deterioration of the family as witnessed by a neighbor.

A later period has this neighbor returning from WWII and encountering a group of occupying US GIs. Though they have no reason, and are warned, the leader decides to investigate the cursed farm. They provoke the goo in the farm's well and see it assemble and fly away from the planet.

Decades later, the head GI has returned and we follow his adult son as he seeks him, encounters the now aged witness and hears everything we have seen. Meanwhile, a dam has newly been built over the infected farm and the water is rising. The son finds and gathers his now crazed father at the edge of the water.

What works is having the elderly witness tell us the story from the 30s and see it in terms of films from that era. Watching the sons through this period was tough and touching. We could have had more of this and less of the brooding wife.

What did not work for me:

— the extra level of the soldier after WWII. This seems to be there only to tell us that the goo is still alive and to give us someone to later tell the story to.

— But in this segment, we see what could be all the goo assemble into something like a spacecraft and leave. But then are we to think that some remains. The oft-murmered question of whether "it is over" is not powerful enough to affect me.

— The finding of the lost father could tell us the answer to that question. He seems altered by some remaining force, or was he just suffering from what came before. We don't need answers to every question; this kind of story is better off with mysteries. But the filmmaker owes it to us to not raise unnecessary questions.

"Die Farbe" or "The Colour Out of Space" is a German, (mostly) German-language film from 2010 and so far the most recent work by Vietnamese writer and director Huan Vu, his second full feature film. "Writer" is of course only partially correct here as the base material comes from the fairly famous American writer H.P. Lovecraftand Vu adapted his work for the screen here. I have not read Lovecraft's work, but I am sure that his involvement with the project is the main reason why this film is actually somewhat known still. It is not too long, only runs for 80 minutes (without credits) and is almost exclusively in black-and-white. It is the story of a man looking for his father and the strange occurrences he meets on the way. The film does not really deliver through great story-telling, but in my opinion it is all about the haunting atmosphere in here. There were some scenes that were okay to watch, but overall I was not too impressed. The scene with the huge insect gave me the chills though, now that was some scary stuff for sure. But it is just not enough for a film of this runtime and maybe half the runtime could have been a better choice. Anyway, after seeing this one I cannot say I am particularly sad about Vu's lack of filmmaking in the last six years as the movie did not get me curious about other works from him. The ending wasn't that great either and the sudden inclusion of color into black-and-white films has been done better on many occasions. This film came out shortly after the very successful "Das weiße Band" (Haneke), another black-and-white movie, and I wonder if this inspired Vu perhaps to make this creative choice as well. Anyway, the outcome here is underwhelming. I give it a thumbs-down and do not recommend checking it out.

This film contains elements of science fiction, horror, drama, and mystery, but none of these genres describe it properly. I think it would be best to describe it only as a quality adaptation of Lovecraft, because in the literature he is also a genre for itself.

For me, it is one of the best adaptations of Lovecraft's energy out there. It's adapting the story "A color out of space" and shows more the fear of the unknown instead of pure 'Horror'.

Vu did a great job in TRANSLATING Lovecraftian narration from literature to a visual medium: Here's how he did it (and that's also all the things I loved about that great adaptation):

a) The POETRY and beauty in showing DETAILS. Caused by the very slow pacing, silence and often montage / image powered narration, a lot of scenes / sequences don't use dialogue or voice narration, but instead show the 'consequences' of the color: from dead birds to oversized fruits to beautiful landscapes in each season to going-insane actors. Close up, wide angle, slow - combined with beautiful orchestral music or silence or sound design to exaggerate the natural noises. It shows what happens while describing it - just like Lovecraft described the scenes, landscapes, situations, dialogues (it is a strength of his writings).

b) The SOUND design. The slow pacing leaves space to show - silence. A lot of seconds don't feature dialogue or noises or music, just actor's exploring or the mood. It takes a slow approach to allow the viewer to 'feel' and get into the story, without overwhelming him with overboarding sensations. It creates space to FEEL and to build tension, like Lovecraft did it in so many stories. Also, there is a lot of (beautiful) orchestral sound design, sometimes with classic suspense/horror techniques, but not overly used. Other times the noises are very exaggerated, like birds singing, church bells ringing... to let the audience really soak in the surrounding and keeps him observing the scene. Just like the protagonists slowly explore the change in nature and humans as fate takes its course. Personally, I got reminded of Solaris by Tarkowski, which features also very slow pacing and beautiful sound to create a rather atmospheric mood-film to brood and think (also, beautiful images about a distorted space ... as the color goes off into 'space', the same feeling is created in this film). Also I had to think of Richard Wagners 'Götterdämmerung' cycle, which feels very ethereal, powerful and dramatic at the same time. Every bit is used in the right situation to enhance it.

c) LESS IS MORE: DON'T SHOW THE HORROR! Lovecraft's most used technique. LC never described the horror itself, but stayed with 'indescribable' horror, instead he wrote how the protagonist FELT while looking at it (monsters, strange entities, what ever it may be). This adaptation get's that technique right, again: over the course of the film the protagonist encounters various people going mad or even changing into.. something.. worse. The camera stays a long time on the actors face, their hands, the door, just details, instead of SHOWING the cruel thing. Due to the story and story-telling-logic, at some point the horror-object HAS to be shown, but the film does it in an elegant way: showing it through distortion, blurred lenses, wide angles - things that never let you see the FULL horror, just parts of it.

d) The SLOW PACE builds TENSION on it's own. Like previously mentioned the narration rhythm stays very slow to show details, consequences and enhances the protagonist's sensation of his surroundings, as he slowly explores and understands the fatal effects of 'the color'. I think that is a genius move to slowly sink into the poetic, slow, describing atmosphere of Lovecraft, who often used similar techniques to make the viewer uncomfortable. Silent, but effective.

e) Nostalgia and melancholic tone that unveil a DREARY, UNSETTLING MOOD. As a German I've seen the landscapes and places where the film is set. The lost country houses (shot in a museum, actually), the costumes, the empty, somehow poor and inanimate living-spaces of the protagonists feel stale, unsettling and show German TRISTESSE. That dreary mood unveils what Lovecraft is really good at: making the reader feel helpless and hopeless in face of cosmic entities, monsters and all those things a human can't keep up with. Also, I feel that a lot of camera angles are slightly 'off', like too low, too high, too tilted and when it comes to people going-mad... too close. You can't escape their expressions. (Sadly, that technique isn't used too often / not consequent enough.) So, to me, the effect of film and writing are the same, even though they are achieved with different methods. I think, that is why this adaptation really FEELS lovecraftian.

f) The COLOR of the color. It is a really great concept to start off the film in black and white - it distances the viewer in an unsettling way, giving space for him to imagine the rest. You'll forget about the fact of 'color' in general for the first half of the film - and also it sets you back INSTANTLY to a previous era, sparking the feeling of nostalgia. Sure, you CAN'T show a NEW color in film, and yes, that is surely a setback (as LCs color is 'unknown' and 'indescribable'), but for me, the film found an artificial solution that works somehow very well: In the second half, the color is finally introduced - and they chose one of the most 'unnatural' colors in nature. Pink only shows in flowers or poisonous frogs for example, not a 'natural' color that settles you down and calms you. Color psychology done right: pink and violet is a very unsettling color in itself, often used for digital /sci-fi elements... manmade, artificial - not-natural to us.

The only set-back I could think of: it was crowd funded and therefore there was nearly no money at all for a huge film like that. I imagine it could have been even MORE exciting with more funding behind it. BUT: The team did an AWESOME job with the tiny budget they had to create something BEAUTIFUL as this. Wowie!

So, overall I really enjoyed the slowness, poetry and nostalgic vibe of the film, which really helped to set the mood for a REAL Lovecraftian watching session.

I give it 9 stars BECAUSE I know how hard it is to really translate a powerful piece of writing into something visual. Well done, guys.