Despite all our rage, he’s still Nicolas Cage

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.

Mandy has the benefit of a clear-cut revenge narrative, which makes it easier to follow and swallow the ethereal, ghostly, forested landscape in which Red (played by Cage) and his girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), live, make love, lumber wood and read pulpy sci-fi horror novels. It seems like a simple, pleasant experience, but one 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 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 requires violent acts that push Mandy into torture-porn territory? Or is it the bearded lumberjack, who is solely a freak because he’s Nicolas freakin’ 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.

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.≈≈≈