Mandy is a 2018 horror/thriller set in the primal wilderness of 1983 where Red Miller, a broken and haunted man hunts an unhinged religious sect who slaughtered the love of his life.
It would sort of be impossible to even mention Panos Cosmatos‘ unnerving new film Mandy and not bring up Nicolas Cage, who for a long time has been on this bender of making very bad to very not so very bad movies, given a chance here to unleash like he’s seemed always ready to do in a story made to form for such. Cosmatos is not your run of the mill filmmaker looking simply to cast an actor known for his abandon for the sake of it, instead, a visionary who understands the power of doing so in a tale that almost feels compelled by his presence. It’s a film wholly unhinged, off its rocker mad with plenty to make it off putting and arrestingly magnetic, yet driven entirely by Cage in a performance that gives justice to the actor’s kinetic approach.
Deep in the peaks of the Shadow Mountains, lumberjack Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) is living a peaceful dream with his beautiful girlfriend Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough), a talented artist with a penchant for fantasy. Into their world crashes Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roach), the patriarch of a nearby drug-addled cult called the New Dawn, who calls upon black magic of sorts in having a violent biker gang called the Black Skulls rush the house and erupt in mayhem, killing Mandy when she fails to fall under Sand’s influence and leaving Red left for dead. Rising from the ashes of the horror, Red dedicates himself to hunting Jeremiah, arming himself to the teeth and committed to destroying everything in his path.
A mind-bender soaked in blood and sheer absurdity, Mandy is a visual feast of madness come to life, the crimson soaked screen alight with jaw-dropping moments that repulse and tingle, keeping this one of the year’s most head-trippy films. It mixes live action with animation and all sorts of visual trickery that keeps it a kind of dark fairytale of revenge unlike anything you’ll probably ever see. Dripping with stylistic horror ooze and soaked in gripping 80s-esque psychedelic music (composed by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson), it’s both a slow burn and a volcano of weirdness, one that will certainly test your limits but is absolutely entertaining, at least for viewers who are able to keep going. It’s like a bad head trip as seen through a drug-induced hallucination, which sometimes muddles things up but often feels like nothing you’ve experienced before.
Smack in the middle of this is Cage, who clearly delights in the chance to go off the deep end, hacking away at demon-like monsters primed with a special elixir akin to Red Bull laced with rocket fuel. You may not know it yet, but you’ve always wanted to see Cage splattered in blood dueling it out with spikey headed motorcycle monsters, bringing down his home-made battle axe on their heads like Thor’s hammer. This is the Cage we’ve been waiting for, his work of late simply too tame, too suppressing to really let him uncork and we ought to thank Cosmatos for letting that happen. Sure, Riseborough, Roach, and even a brief moment with Bill Duke are all good, but it’s Cage why this movie will be remembered.
You’ve maybe heard of the epic chainsaw fight and if you haven’t you should know one exists, it being part of much of the horrors within. This is going to be a divisive movie and know going in that it not only reaches for the lunatic fringe, it takes three steps back and leaps over it. Over-diligence is the main ingredient and because so will surely taste just right for fans and newcomers of the genre.