Cage let unnervingly off the leash
Mandy Cert tbc, 121 min
★★★★★ Dir: Panos Cosmatos; Starring: Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Olwen Fouéré
For years, Nicolas Cage’s more extreme performances have been derided as a blight on cinema, but it turns out that cinema just had to catch up. Mandy, the new film from Panos Cosmatos, which had its European premiere at the Cannes Film Festival at the weekend, is the ideal stage for a Cage wig-out.
Equal parts supernatural splatter horror and hypnotic gallery installation, Mandy unfolds in a doom-laden narcosis that is unlike anything else around, although there are reference points everywhere, including Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising,
Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy, and the giallo horror of Dario Argento. It often looks like an Iron Maiden album cover cartoon come to life – and there are three animated sequences that owe a stylistic debt to Heavy Metal, the science fiction magazine.
But it treats its arch aesthetic with total artistic seriousness. It also features the final completed score by the Icelandic composer Johann Johannson.
The year is 1983 and Cage is Red, a taciturn lumberjack who lives in a woodland cabin somewhere in the Shadow Mountains with the love of his life, Mandy – a transfixingly weird performance by Andrea Riseborough. A Satanic cult pitches up, led by Jeremiah (Linus Roache), who earmarks Mandy as a disciple, then summons three demons – slime-oozing goons, without a visible lick of CGI – to help abduct her. This sets in motion a grisly downward spiral.
The first half of the film has the feel of a glossy, semi-fluid dream, even before a giant insect injects Mandy with some kind of hallucinatory sedative. Then Cage cuts loose as he embarks on his revenge mission fuelled by anger, alcohol, and controlled and possibly also occult substances. There is an extraordinary transitional sequence in which a heartbroken Red stumbles into the bathroom, guzzles vodka and goes berserk with grief in a manner that to me recalled the way Popeye used to squeeze open a tin of spinach then hover in the air while a cartoon steam train appeared on his bicep.
It is simultaneously horrible and ludicrous, and so sets the tone for much that follows. Mandy exists in its own supremely unnerving horror dimension.