Cannes: Why was everyone weirdly dressed at Nicole Kidman's movie premiere?

CANNES, France — Cannes Film Festival is known for its outrageous, risk-taking fashion.

But the team behind How to Talk to Girls at Parties took it to a whole new level.

If you were at Sunday's premiere of the new sci-fi romantic comedy, you probably did a double take walking past the bizarrely dressed actors flanking Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning on the Palais des Festivals red carpet.

It's not every day you see someone wearing a turquoise latex suit, a caped purple turtleneck, and an orange-and-black bodysuit with breast and genital holes cut out.

Oh, and in case you missed them in the first picture: Here are two guys in skintight yellow and white dresses, respectively.

So is this some kind of Hunger Games Capitol cosplay, or was there an explosion at the costume factory? Good guesses, but neither. These are actually all outfits worn by the ritualistic alien species in How to Talk to Girls at Parties. Punk-music fan Enn (Alex Sharp) and his friends stumble upon the space travelers in a garish for-sale house, where he is instantly smitten with the inquisitive Zan (Fanning).

The different colors delineate how far along the aliens are in their life cycles when they land in 1977 Croydon, England. Zan, for example, dresses in yellow, meaning she is in her "fourth incarnation" and only has 48 hours to live before she is devoured by her creator. Completely normal stuff, right?

The ensemble actors weren't the only ones who looked the part at Cannes. Sharp wore a suit emblazoned with punk insignia, while Kidman wore a shimmery, ruffled dress reminiscent of her character Boadicea, a "fairy punkmother" with silver hair that gives us major David Bowie-Labyrinth vibes.

Fanning's mint-green Gucci gown bore no resemblance to Zan's attire, but was no less daring with its plunging neckline.

She couldn't have been cuter hugging and laughing with Kidman, who is also her co-star in Sofia Coppola's The Beguiled (premiering Wednesday at Cannes). The actresses walked arm in arm into the Grand Theatre Lumiere and sat next to each other at the screening.

How to Talk to Girls at Parties will be distributed by A24, although no release date has been set.