10 Movies With Exquisite Monochromatic Color Schemes

Monochromatic color palettes are very useful tools for filmmakers. The color scheme - which involves an image feeling harmonious because it is built from various lighter and darker shades of the same hue - can be created with color grading, lighting, production, and costume design, or any combination of the three.

While this color palette has been used to make particular moments pop in a number of great movies, 10 movies in particular wield monochromatic colors in multiple scenes throughout their runtimes, to great effect.

1. Last Night in Soho(2021)

‘Last Night in Soho’ (2021)Credit: Universal Pictures

Last Night in Soho’s impressive mirror shots are typically what come up first when discussing the Edgar Wright time travel thriller. However, the movie also utilizes monochromatic color in a variety of striking ways. While the lighting typically comes from the environment, thanks to many of the scenes taking place in a Soho club, the bright colors that flood the frame give the movie a lurid, over-the-top feel that emphasizes the fantastical elements of its plot.

2. The Grand Budapest Hotel(2014)

‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ (2014)Credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Wes Anderson shows off a very different way to achieve monochromatic color palettes in The Grand Budapest Hotel. His colors typically come from design elements like costumes and sets rather than lighting, though they accomplish a similar goal to Last Night in Soho. Anderson’s typical arch and deadpan dialogue work well when paired with the intentional artifice of the backgrounds. They place the movie in a more fantastical space that makes the characters’ behavior, which is not quite recognizably human, feel of a piece with their environment.

3. The Three Colours Trilogy (1993-1994)

‘Three Colours: Red’ (1994), ‘Three Colours: White’ (1994), and ‘Three Colours: Blue’ (1993)Credit: Rialto Film

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy lives up to its name by flooding each installment with various shades of its titular color. This provides a constant reminder of the movie’s symbolic approach to storytelling, which is to use the three colors of the French flag to explore the qualities that they represent, which are liberty, equality, and fraternity.

4. Heavenly Creatures(1994)

‘Heavenly Creatures’ (1994)Credit: Miramax International

Peter Jackson’s pre-Lord of the Rings movie Heavenly Creatures has very down-to-earth subject matter, as it dramatizes the real-life friendship that blossomed between teenagers Pauline Parker (Melanie Lynskey) and Juliet Hulme (Kate Winslet), which eventually led to the death of Pauline’s mother, Honora (Sarah Peirse).

However, the movie uses monochromatic colors to make certain sequences unreal and highlight the rich fantasy life that both of the socially isolated characters have. The movie suggests that this intense separation from material reality is one of the reasons that they were capable of premeditated murder, but the rich color also highlights why such a fantasy life might have been so tempting in the first place.

5. Audition(1999)

‘Audition’ (1999)Credit: Lionsgate

Takashi Miike’s horror movie Audition uses monochromatic colors to create an effect that is almost exactly the opposite of Heavenly Creatures ’ approach. The story initially seems like a straightforward drama, presenting a more-or-less realistic look at the life of widower Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who holds a fake audition for a movie so he can find himself a new wife. While the candidate he picks, Asami Yamazaki (Eihi Shiina), seems perfect at first, it becomes quickly apparent that she hides many twisted secrets.

As Aoyama is plunged further and further into the lurid horror that associating with Yamazaki has exposed him to, the colors grow more and more monochromatic and fantastical, emphasizing how atypically brutal the situation becomes.

6. Suspiria(1977)

‘Suspiria’ (1977)Credit: Produzioni Atlas Consorziate

Dario Argento’s supernatural horror masterpiece Suspiria lets audiences know that something is terribly wrong from the second that American ballet student Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) sets foot in the town of Freiburg, where she has come to study at a prestigious academy that she doesn’t realize is run by witches. Almost every scene is drenched in unreal colors that make her experience into a kaleidoscopic, beautiful nightmare.

7. Hausu(1977)

‘Hausu’ (1977)Credit: Toho

There must have been something in the water in 1977, because the same year that produced Suspiria also brought us Nobuhiko Obayashi’s phantasmagorical epic Hausu. The movie, which follows a witch (Yōko Minamida) regaining her youth by killing a group of schoolgirls one by one in absurd supernatural scenarios, uses a variety of experimental filmmaking techniques. This includes forcing the audience off-kilter again and again with oversaturated monochromatic color palettes.

8. Querelle(1982)

‘Querelle’ (1982)Credit: Scotia

The images in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s erotic arthouse movie Querelle , based on the Jean Genet novel Querelle of Brest , look like a Creamsicle bar has melted over the film print, in the best way possible. Most of the outdoor scenes (and some of the indoor scenes) are drenched in various shades of orange or yellow, making it seem like the intentionally artificial-looking port town of Brest is constantly in the middle of dazzling sunrises or sunsets.

This super-charges the themes of the movie, which follows the titular sailor, Georges Querelle (Brad Davis), sending the entire town into an erotic tizzy, with his sheer sexuality essentially tearing the fabric of society apart. The sunrise/sunset aesthetic, which places Brest in a ceaseless inflection point between day and night, emphasizes that fact that the town is in the midst of a major transition.

9. The Matrix(1999)

‘The Matrix’ (1999)Credit: Warner Bros.

While the Wachowskis do use other colors in their 1999 sci-fi epic The Matrix , they largely craft their images from green hues. This is meant to mimic the bright green code that brings the computerized world of The Matrix to life, constantly reminding the audience that the scenes that take place there aren’t technically “real.” The green hues also feel mottled and rotten and sickly, emphasizing the fact that the seemingly perfect computer world is a construct hiding the grim reality that the real world has gone to seed.

10. Cube(1997)

‘Cube’ (1997)Credit: Trimark Pictures

Vincenzo Natali’s cerebral sci-fi thriller Cube - which follows a group of characters who are trapped in a booby-trapped labyrinth of cube-shaped rooms - uses monochromatic colors in two ways. The first is to cleverly make the low-budget movie more expansive, changing the color of the single cube-shaped set to make it feel like a variety of different rooms.

The other is to amp up the intensity of the characters’ plight. The fact that the colors feel so uniform exaggerates the crushing monotony of their experience, making them feel like they have no chance of escaping.

While these movies all wield monochromatic color palettes with aplomb, that color scheme is just one of many different types of palettes that can bring movies to life and provide them with powerful symbolism. Find out more by exploring the No Film School back catalogue, which includes breakdowns of analogous colors, discordant palettes, and more.