Fast Color (Julia Hart, 2018) (Patreon)

As time goes on, if future audiences discover Fast Color, one of the defining aspects of the film will be that it was largely ignored because it fell between chairs, that no one knew how to market it or receive it at the time of its release. I suspect its reputation will in fact build over time, but it would be a shame if it got saddled with "cult film" status, and all the baggage that entails. This isn't Donnie Darko. And, despite some critics' perceptions to the contrary, this is in no way, shape, or form a "black superhero movie."

Quiet and downcast, with a deliberate pace and a gradual build, Fast Color is set in an extremely plausible "post-apocalyptic" period, not too far from our present day. No zombies or Mad Max-style metallic marauders. It's just a world ravished by drought. And we meet Ruth (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) a young woman on the run, who has a physical disorder that causes large earthquakes. She is trying to get back to her childhood home, an outpost in the middle of nowhere where her mother (Lorraine Toussant) is raising Lila (Saniyaa Sidney), the child she abandoned some years ago.

Hart (a white woman, who co-wrote Fast Color with her husband, La La Land producer Jordan Horowitz) organizes the film around black womanist themes: generational ties, marginality, and above all, the notion of secret powers of healing and survival that are misunderstood, or actively assailed, by a white male society that reflexively acts out of misogynoir. These specially-gifted women are there to be captured, studied, controlled, or killed -- but never to be learned from.

If there is a single source that seems to most obviously inform Fast Color, it would be the Afro-Futurist speculative fiction of Octavia Butler. In particular, her Parable series addessed similar concerns of environmental collapse, whereas her earlier Xenogenesis series postulated many post-human variants of species, some of whom possessed special abilities which could solve problems that the original human race had created. While Fast Color provides no explanation for why the women in this particular family can manipulate matter -- they just always have been able to -- the film articulates a crisis point at which they no longer have the "luxury" of hiding, and the larger world can no longer afford to be afraid of them. So in a sense, Fast Color depicts a moment in the evolution of human consciousness as dramatic as that seen in "big" films like Arrival or Interstellar, but it is depicted as something altogether "simpler" -- the shift of our world's racial / gender power axis.