Ambitious Mandy delivers

Somewhere way off the beaten track in the forests of what might be America’s Pacific Northwest, there lives a besottedly-in-love couple.

She – Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) – is an artist, ploughing a possibly lucrative groove of fantasy landscapes and half-clad warrior women for the student-flat poster market. He – Red – is Nicolas Cage. And that really is all we need to know.

Mandy takes its time getting to the trailer-fodder. It is truly unusual for any director to have the confidence and the freedom to spend the first hour of a two-hour revenge-thriller just setting the scene and building the world Mandy and Red share.

But Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow) does just that. By the time Cage is transformed into a drug-fuelled, vengeance-seeking maniac with a giant freaking homemade axe in one hand and a severed head in the other (yes, this really happens), the film is well into its final third.

The time, care and commitment Cosmatos brings to that first hour pay off richly as we hit the last laps of Mandy. We are invested in this place and these people, and though the film might reach levels of cinematic dementedness we haven’t seen in a decade, it never descends into farce or cheap laughs.

Mandy is a hellaciously ambitious film, swinging at any number of genre conventions and rewriting the rule book on what a revenge-thriller might be allowed to look and sound like, but not for a second does it feel like a film out of control or unsure of its next step.

I didn’t know where Mandy was going to veer off to next, but Cosmatos assuredly did.

In the leads, Riseborough takes ‘‘hero’s partner’’ to a level we don’t often see.

While we collectively have had enough of the whole woman’s-fateinspires-male-revenge genre (see my colleague Kylie Klein-Nixon’s excellent column on ‘‘fridging’’ a few weeks back), Riseborough and Cosmatos at least make Mandy a fleshed-out and singular character who exists quite separately from Cage.

Also, Mandy is explicitly an homage/parody of the hoary old genre, so Cosmatos earns a pass from all of us who think far too much about these things.

But Cage is just next-level here. Mandy is a sci-fi infused, technically stunning and deliriously inventive film that I adored from beginning to end.

But if anyone asks me, I’m just going to tell them it’s also the single greatest outing by Nicolas Cage in a decade.

If you’re a Cage fan (and seriously, why wouldn’t you be?) then just get along there. Now.

Mandy is the single greatest outing by Nicolas Cage in a decade.