Mandy (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Logger Red (Nicolas Cage) and artist Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) live a quiet life in a cabin in the woods. However, that life is shattered when they come across a hippie cult run by Jeremiah (Linus Roache), who takes Mandy as his own... and then kills her. Red sets out on a bloody and drug-addled path of vengeance to destroy the cult.

It seems that Nic Cage has found his ideal team-up with writer/director Panos Cosmatos. Not only is this the most gleefully unhinged the man has been in quite some time, it doesn’t carry that lingering effect that he is working at 11 when the story needs him at an 8. Instead, Cage at his Cagey-est is precisely what is called for, balancing out some quieter drama, batshit-insane mugging and even a bit of action hero bravado to make for a role that will go down as one of the man’s best ever. The only other person here who can hold a candle to this level of hyper-manic energy is Roache, who gets across a comparable amount of sheer insanity but adds in some unnerving charisma that makes it all too easy a sell that this is someone who can use faux-piety to bend others to his will.

Riseborough in the title role gives the film some much-needed grounding and a healthy serving of pathos early on, and even considering her place in the traditional revenge thriller narrative, she still manages to pull off one of the film’s single most powerful moments when she stands up to Jeremiah. Ned Dennehy as Jeremiah’s right-hand man gives the role a certain creeping unease, while Olwen Fouéré makes for Creepy Triumphant in how her soft-spoken ways sink under the audience’s skin. Line Pillet, Clément Baronnet, Alexis Julemont and Stephan Fraser as the other members of the cult range from cracked-out to having all kinds of fun with the role, all of which results in some solid performances, Ivailo Dimitrov, Kalin Kerin and Tamás Hagyuó as the demonic bikers (yeah, we got those in this movie; strap yourself in) give off a lot of immediate “cross continents to avoid these psychos” vibes, Richard Brake makes for a decent bit part and leaves a surprisingly indelible impression, and Bill Duke gives an equally surprising performance that adds some real oomph to the film’s more action-centric leanings.

This is a production in the vein of Lead Me Astray where the sheer intent behind tapping into old-school genre visuals creates some mesmerising effects. DOP Benjamin Loeb’s use of colour owes a lot to painterly filmmakers like Dario Argento and even early Michael Mann, often leaving the entire frame in a wash that feels like the audience is being submerged in an endless technicolour ocean. Unholy greens, hellish reds, disarming blues and painfully-bright pinks weave in and out of the film’s frame to form a genuinely psychedelic experience. Add to that the other tricks up his sleeve, like the ingenious use of cross-fades and delayed motion blur, and the filmmakers appear determined to plaster as many intoxicating textures onto this film as humanly possible. Or possibly as inhumanly possible, given the frequently surreal, black metal-inspired imagery that frequents the frame, not to mention the outright nightmarish drug trip sequences. Oh, and we have animated moments on top of that, all of which mesh together into one hell of a head trip. Especially when paired with Jóhann Jóhannsson’s compositions, which follow the early-Mann-inspired colours with some Tangerine Dream worship in how aggressively 80’s the synths can get.

Of course, anything serene or scarily calming that exists in this film is not here for long; if the first half of this film is the blissful high, then the second is the mind-rattling collision course back down to Earth. Once the film starts to engage more keenly with the action-thriller trappings on offer, we get what may be some of the most gloriously over-the-top action beats we’re likely to see all year. Or possibly for the rest of this decade. Crossbow bolts, chainsaws and hand-crafted battleaxes mark the road down which this film goes from being a journey into the subconscious into a highly visceral roar right into the conscious. Much like Cage himself, this feels like where potentially-amazing aspects were pulled from elsewhere, but given a place where they could be nurtured and brought into eye-bugging fruition. This is one of the rare few films nowadays to get an R18+ rating here in Australia, and between the geyser-levels of gore and the unabashed creativity put into the carnage that spills it, it certainly feels like it earned such a rating.

But as anyone who has read my past reviews will know by now, there’s only so much that surface genre entertainment can provide; we need to dig deeper. And thankfully, this is a film that has quite a brain behind all the garish lunacy. Cosmatos and co-writer Aaron Stewart-Ahn get into similar territory to Cosmatos’ break-out feature Beyond The Black Rainbow, looking at how much generational wear-and-tear affected the free-spirited late 60's-early 70's counterculture. This likewise delves into the darker side of psychedelia, presenting the kind of trip where you don’t see what you want but what you need to resolve subliminal damage, but it delves into more specific territory than last time.

While explicitly set in the 80’s, much like Black Rainbow, this film ends up owing more to the cult exploitation trend of the 70’s, where real-life Jeremiahs like Jim Jones and Charles Manson gave birth to a cultural dark corner of the cinematic landscape. The decision to make Jeremiah both a cult leader and a failed musician shows the surface Manson influence in the script. But further down than that, what we get through seeing Jeremiah, his cult and the sense of entitlement that his complex has given him is an at-times uncomfortable look at the underbelly of Flower Power. All that time looking to expand one’s mind through chemicals, and yet there are those who used those same ends to turn people into their own personal soldiers, all under the guise of acid-drenched piety. Hell, those mind-altering chemicals themselves turned out to be far more damaging than their pushers would have people believe. More so than aiming at the degeneration of the Baby Boomers that would fill in those numbers, along with progressing into the 80's cult of conformity, this looks more at the religious pretences that worked against it and even alongside it. The cults that warped hippie ideologues to their own ends, the moral panic drivers who decried that such things as Motley Crue and Black Sabbath were tools of Satan himself, and the evangelicals who used philosophy less as a means to understand the universe and more as a means to further their own goals.

All in all… fucking hell, this is something to be experienced. The acting is absolutely fantastic, with Nicolas Cage giving a serious career highlight of a performance, the visuals turn the screen into a blinding flurry of mind-altering colour palettes, the soundtrack only further shows how much of a great talent we lost with the death of Jóhann Jóhannsson, the action scenes are the right kind of creatively insane, and the writing brings it all together to further progress Panos Cosmatos’ warpath against the Baby Boomer generation and how much their idealism became tainted with age, ego and the wrong prescriptions. Whether you watch this stone-cold sober or on enough pharmaceuticals to kill a small elephant, you’re guaranteed a spell-binding experience of a film with this one.