Cage perfectly matched
Actor’s chaotic energy suits odd ode to cultish violence in new revenge thriller
It’s perhaps a little unfair for Italian-Canadian director Panos Cosmatos to rely so heavily on Nicolas Cage’s legendary genius, in all of its hysterical, chaotic energy, to carry his film, Mandy. But he does — perhaps unintentionally, or perhaps knowingly.
It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day, because Mandy is a substantially more fulfilling experience as a result, a remarkable forward step for Cosmatos since his first film, Beyond the Black Rainbow. That torturously slow, dreamy sci-fi horror, which won a handful of Canadian film awards, felt more like an exercise in creating a textural experience, reminiscent of Cosmatos’s own dreams, than a proper movie inspired by dystopian masterpieces including THX 1138.
Mandy has the benefit of a clear-cut revenge narrative, at least, which makes it easier to follow and swallow the ghostly, forested landscape in which Red (played by Cage) and his girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) live, cut wood and read pulpy sci-fi horror novels. It seems like a simple, pleasant experience, but one that is marked by terror as soon as a goth cult rolls into town, finding a new target in Mandy, young blood fresh for sexual harvesting.
The violence that follows her kidnapping marks a stark tonal shift, from lugubrious daydreaming inspired by the solitude of nature to a straight-up bloodbath and circus show, though who’s the biggest freak here? Is it the literal freaks, the cultists, whose subservience to their master (Linus Roache, who resembles a Swedish glam-rock queen) requires violent acts that push
Mandy into torture-porn territory? Or is it the bearded lumberjack, who’s solely a freak because he’s Nicolas freakin’ Cage?
I’d argue it’s the lumberjack, who awakens from his deep lumber-slumber to find his beloved girlfriend taken from him by sadistic monsters, in some cases literal demons, who wreak havoc on his body, leaving him a bloody mess. Cage’s transformation into revenge king, with raw screams of despair, and effective (yet somehow hilarious) use of alcohol as both a means of liquid courage and wound disinfectant, are where Mandy finally becomes a real movie worth watching.
For all the ’80s metal-horror and Reagan-era references, Mandy works best not when it tries to contextualize the past into a tapestry of nostalgia set in the present, but when it taps into the animalistic fervour that is Cage.
An ultimate battle involving chainsaws is worth the price of admission. It’s worth questioning if the film would have been even close to remarkable without Cage’s performance, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with a film that acknowledges its deep need for cult-status, deliberate midnight-madness vibe. Even if you’re not a heavy metal fan, one can’t help but love how Cosmatos turns an entire genre of music into a mode of filmmaking, and how Cage turns all of that into an authentically raw, vulnerable, blood-soaked performance.