Fast Color
Fast Color is low-budget sci-fi at its absolute best, anchored by a powerhouse Gugu Mbatha-Raw performance.
There is a version of the superhero genre that Hollywood has never quite managed to make consistently, despite the evidence that audiences will respond to it when it arrives. Not the origin story scaled to a summer tentpole, but the intimate version: the one that treats extraordinary ability as a condition to be lived with rather than a power to be deployed. The version where the question is not how the hero defeats the villain but how a person with abilities the world fears manages to exist in that world at all. The X-Men franchise has gestured at this question for twenty-five years across more than a dozen films and has answered it definitively exactly once, in Logan, by stripping the mythology down to something close to a character study. Fast Color, released in 2019 to thirty theaters nationwide in the same week that Avengers: Endgame consumed the entire cultural oxygen supply, answers the same question differently and, in certain crucial respects, more completely. It is the finest film the superhero genre has produced that the superhero genre has almost entirely failed to notice.
Lionsgate's decision to open Fast Color against Endgame is one of the more baffling release strategy choices in recent memory, and the film paid the full price for it. A wide audience simply never had the opportunity to find it theatrically, which is a loss given that the film's visual ambition rewards a large screen. Its arrival on Netflix corrects that injustice imperfectly but meaningfully, putting it in front of the audience it always deserved without requiring anyone to drive to a major city to find one of the thirty screens willing to show it.
Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) is a woman on the run, managing a condition she does not fully understand that causes earthquakes when she loses control of herself. She returns, reluctantly, to the rural home she fled years earlier, where her mother Bo (Lorraine Toussaint) and her daughter Lila (Saniyya Sidney) have been living quietly and carefully with abilities of their own. All three women share a power: the ability to disassemble matter into streams of color and reassemble it, a gift that each of them has learned to use, hide, and understand in different ways across different generations of the same family. The world outside their home is one in which water has become scarce and the government has spent years searching for people with abilities like theirs. David Strathairn also stars as a local officer navigating his own complicated history with Ruth.
What Julia Hart's film understands, and what distinguishes it from virtually every other entry in this genre, is that the most interesting thing about extraordinary ability is not what it can do to an enemy but what it costs the person who has it. Ruth's power is not a gift she has learned to wield heroically. It is something closer to a chronic illness, a force that surfaces when her emotional regulation fails and that has defined the shape of her life in ways that are entirely unglamorous. The film is interested in the specific texture of that experience: the way Ruth moves through the world with the particular wariness of someone who knows what happens when she stops being careful, the way that wariness has shaped her relationships, and what it means to come home to a mother and a daughter who have their own relationship to the same inheritance.
The three central performances are what make the film's ambitions land. Mbatha-Raw is doing some of the finest work of her career here, building Ruth from the inside out with a physical specificity that conveys years of hard living without ever reducing the character to her circumstances. Toussaint's Bo is the film's quiet anchor, a woman who has made her peace with what she is and what she can do and who radiates a warmth and a steadiness that gives the film its emotional center. Sidney's Lila is the most hopeful element of the story, a child who has grown up with her abilities as a natural part of her world rather than a source of fear, and whose relationship with her grandmother represents a continuity that Ruth's absence interrupted. The dynamic between all three of them is rendered with a patience and a specificity that most films about family do not achieve.
The film's visual language is worth dwelling on. The sequences in which the women use their abilities are shot with a simplicity and a beauty that makes the low budget irrelevant. Disassembling an object into streams of color moving through the air is not a complicated special effect, but Hart and cinematographer Michael Fimognari treat it with the reverence of something wondrous, and the cumulative effect is of a film that has found the exact right register for what it is trying to say. This is what powers should look like when the film is actually about the people who have them.
Fast Color is in an incredibly limited theatrical run now and, if you are in one of the major markets with screenings, there is no reason left not to see it. It is the rare genre film that uses its genre entirely in service of its characters rather than the other way around, and it makes every bloated franchise entry that has ever asked you to care about the fate of the universe look slightly embarrassed by comparison. See it immediately.
