RLJE Films. 2018. Horror/Thriller. 121 minutes.
It’s been eight years since the release of Beyond the Black Rainbow, the debut feature from director Panos Cosmatos and a striking visual and aural regurgitation of ‘70s sci-fi movie tropes and ‘80s cult magazine imagery. Its turgid pace and thin story sank the picture but it was hard not to be impressed by the director’s ability to create a tactile, phantasmagorical world of light, sound and color.
Mandy, his follow-up feature, is only a minor step forward in terms of story. It is, when stripped down, a simple and conventional tale of murder and revenge. Yet, much like Beyond the Black Rainbow, there is nothing conventional in the telling. Mandy is a hypnotic and thrilling freak-out that has us in its thrall from the opening credits, even when the director becomes a little too indulgent, if that’s possible in a psychedelic concoction that blends Heavy Metal magazine, Mad Max, Hellraiser, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Death Wish and The Evil Dead, pours it into a goblet and has Ken Russell present it to you with a Laudanum chaser. Stylistically, midnight-movie psychodelia may be the only card Cosmatos will ever play. But with Mandy, he plays it full-bodied and with such confidence that one can only be captivated.
All of Mandy’s lush, prog-rock imagery, gorgeous, hyper-detailed sound design and rivers of blood would mean precious little without lead actor Nicolas Cage. His mid-career run of demoralizing, almost laughable, wig-out performances makes him our perfect guide through the director’s lurid, apocalyptic world. If you thought Cage had found his greatest enabler in shoe-eating iconoclast Werner Herzog (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), Cosmatos has done the German director one better: he’s created a film crazier than Cage is, rendering his performance completely in sync with the nightmare world surrounding him.
Quentin Tarantino may be a slave to his video store-honed influences, but Cosmatos, in setting both of his films in 1983, inhabits, on a deeply internalized level, the Frank Frazetta, fantasy novel aesthetic of the Reagan era. Snippets of Reagan on the radio even feature in both of his films. In Mandy, we hear the former president rail against pornography and abortion as we meet the appropriately-named Red (Cage) a lumberjack living in the Shadow Mountains near (get this, Friday the 13th fans) Crystal Lake with his ladylove, Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). Mandy is an ‘80s hard rock music video dream girl, given to wondering what her boyfriend’s favorite planet is, reading novels with titles like Keeper of the Serpent Sky and sporting Mötley Crüe and Black Sabbath t-shirts, musical preferences that will play a role in her tragic fate. As Cosmatos is not one to care much for detailed characterizations, it’s a tribute to Riseborough that can she turn Mandy into a black-haired, blissed-out ideal worthy of two men getting into a murderous rage over.
The movie is split in two halves and this first hour, dreamy and ominous, establishes the couple in love and in isolation, their woodland hideaway not just miles away but, as established by DP Benjamin Loeb and various effects houses, worlds away from civilization. This languid beginning sinks us into an intoxicating state that Cosmatos, who co-wrote the screenplay with Aaron Stewart-Ahn, shatters when a gang of cultists calling themselves Children of the New Dawn murder Mandy and leave Red chained, Christ-like, and left for dead.
Unlike other Nicolas Cage performances, where he seems to be participating in a one-person primal therapy session, flying off the rails in the colorfully baroque manner that’s become his meme-ready brand, here Cage doesn’t undercut Red’s primal desire for revenge with any ham or self-consciousness (okay, there is one lamentable shot of a bug-eyed Red at the end). When Red, having witnessed the death of his girlfriend and survived being strung up and tortured, retreats to his bathroom and works himself into righteous, booze-guzzling fury, we smile in anticipation of Cage approaching blast off. He flips out alright, but our smile fades as he denies us full satisfaction because Red’s reaction is consistent with the character, the situation and the film’s established style. It’s that kind of disappointment that serves as a reminder that Cage was once a notable actor in both dramas (Leaving Las Vegas, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar) and comedies (the underrated The Weather Man) before devolving into a flamboyant, emotional extrovert.
As we descend into this second, blood-drenched hour, as enveloping as it is, one starts to wonder if Cosmatos is too stuck in adolescence to provide a more robust story and more dimensional characters to go with the Goth, gore and headset-worthy sound mix (including the last completed score by the late, great Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, a soundscape both beautiful and disturbing). But it’s hard to make that argument when in the hands of a director so focused on delivering a trippy, textural experience and nailing it with such skill that it no longer seems narratively undernourished or unoriginal. Artists steal from the best to inspire their own vision and Cosmatos’ inspirations run from the obvious to the obscure. When cult leader Jeremiah (Linus Roache) tries to seduce a drugged-out Mandy, who’d just been injected with a hallucinogenic by some sort of giant wasp, their faces dissolve into one another’s until you swear you’re watching the 1982 video for Heartbeat by prog rock pioneers King Crimson (who provide Mandy’s opening title song). Jeremiah is aided by a monstrous-looking biker gang called the Black Skulls, whose moves are backlit in furnace-grade, warning-sign orange. One looks like a Cenobite from the Hellraiser series and the other looks like he rode in from the set of Mad Max.
Indeed, like the acolytes who serve Jeremiah, these ‘80s cult touchstones serve their own gonzo master. When Cage’s cop character smoked crack in Bad Lieutenant, we thought he was nuts. When Red inhales a mound of cocaine off a shard of broken glass in Mandy, we deem it the least interesting part of his evening. You just can’t take your eyes off this bloodthirsty Avenging Angel, slashing his way through an expertly-rendered cosmic hellscape, covered in blood and armed with a chainsaw, a battle axe and a crossbow he calls “The Reaper.” If each successive kill becomes more inevitable and, therefore, less satisfying, it barely makes a dent in the overall impact.
Mandy is a mesmerizing concept album of B-movie artistry where the style is the substance. It’s most notable accomplishment is to remind us that we don’t need a $250M budget and Spider-Man to create something worth standing in line for. Here’s an inventive and maniacally effective achievement in sensory overload that’s like nothing you’ve ever seen. And if you have seen something like it, whatever you’re smoking, save some for me.