One of the Year’s Best Films, ‘Fast Color,’ is Streaming on Amazon Prime

Fast Color is now streaming free on Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, and that’s a pretty big deal. Why? Because this sci-fi film starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Lorraine Toussaint has been struggling (and struggling, and struggling) to find a home for nearly two years.

Fast Color premiered at South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2018. Despite positive reviews, the film didn’t find distribution right away. It was finally acquired by Codeblack Films, an African American films-focused branch of Lionsgate Entertainment, in September 2018. Then, unfortunately for all involved, Lionsgate split with Codeblack, leaving Fast Color with little to no marketing budget. The release date—originally slotted for March 2019, then pushed back to April—came and went in the blink of an eye. With just 25 theaters showing the film for about four weeks, even the most dedicated of film buffs overlooked it. No surprise then, that the film made a minuscule $76,916 at the box office.

Ten years ago, that box office would be the nail in the film’s coffin. Perhaps film lovers would have discovered Fast Color years later and turned it into a cult hit, but it never would have resurfaced in the conversation time for awards season. Now, thanks to both the streaming and social media revolutions, that doesn’t have to be the case.

Both writer/director Julia Hart and writer/producer Jordan Horowitz (whose name you might recognize as the La La Land producer who interjected to say, “This is not a joke. Moonlight has won Best Picture,” at the 2017 Oscars) advocated hard for their film on Twitter. By the time Fast Color got its digital release in July, it had a few more supporters, critics and movie-lovers alike who urged people to buy or rent a digital copy online. Then, in August, the film nabbed its biggest advocate yet: Viola Davis, whose company with Julius Tennon, JuVee Productions, will be producing a TV series for Amazon Studios based on the film, written by Hart and Horowitz.

In addition to the TV show, the film is streaming on Amazon Prime, making it easy for Academy voters and film critics to watch one of the best films of the year. What makes Fast Color so good? It’s a superhero film, kind of, but one that we’re willing to bet Martin Scorsese would allow as “cinema.” Despite its low budget, it builds out a surreal, unsettling world in creative ways. We know Mbatha-Raw is on the run from law, and we know she has some sort of supernatural abilities that the government wants to study. We soon learn that water is scarce in this world, and that a dirty half-filled jug will cost you twelve bucks at the gas station. Eventually, we learn that the fate of the universe rests in the hands of Mbatha-Raw, her mother (Toussaint, who is best known from Orange is the New Black), and her daughter, played by Saniyya Sidney. At times, the film stumbles, but a rock-solid performance from Mbatha-Raw (best known for her critically acclaimed performance in the “San Junipero” episode of Black Mirror), always holds up.

It’s undoubtedly a long shot that Mbatha-Raw will be recognized for her performance by the Oscars or other award shows this year, but it’s also not an impossibility. If Netflix films like Marriage Story and The Irishman are any indication, streaming is a great way to help great films find their way into the mainstream conversation. Now all you have to do is to tell your friends to stream it on Amazon Prime and Hulu.

Where to stream Fast Color