Cage gets back to his ferocious best
Mandy 18 cert, 121 min ★★★★★ Dir Panos Cosmatos Starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Olwen Fouéré
Nicolas Cage’s more extreme performances have been derided as a blight on cinema for years, but it turns out that cinema just had to catch up. Mandy, the new film from Panos Cosmatos, is the ideal stage for an all-time-great Cage wig-out – plus much more, which we’ll come to – and the actor ferociously obliges.
The year is 1983, and Cage plays Red, a taciturn lumberjack living in a woodland cabin with the love of his life, Mandy, who is played in a dazzling, transfixingly weird performance by Andrea Riseborough. But a doomsday cult pitches up in the area, and their leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) earmarks Mandy as a “chosen one”, and abducts her with the help of the Black Skulls – three nightmarishly costumed, slime-oozing goons. This sends Red on a phantasmagorical revenge spree, involving a crossbow that cuts through bone “like a fat kid through cake”, according to their maker (a nice cameo for Bill Duke), and a freshly forged, four-pointed axe called the Beast.
It is easy to picture a version of
Mandy archly working its way though a genre checklist, but Cosmatos’s film does nothing of the kind: equal parts splatter horror and gallery installation, it unfolds in a dreamy narcosis that is unlike anything else, though there are dabs of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, soupçons of Nicolas Winding Refn, splashes of Sam Raimi and Dario Argento. Three brief cartoon sequences invoke the X-rated spirit of the 1981 animation Heavy Metal – and the feel is often of a living version of a heavy metal LP sleeve. The outstanding score was the last to be completed by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson before his death earlier this year.
But Mandy’s total commitment to its bizarre time-and-space-warping vision queasily upends the usual retro dynamic: rather than reminding you of things you used to like, it fills you with the uneasy sense that you halfremember things you’ve never seen before. Take the ad for a brand of macaroni cheese that flickers across Red’s television screen late one night, which involves a Ghoulies-style puppet vomiting the meal on to children’s plates. It is unnerving, revolting and hilarious – but also feels just enough like a junk food ad of yore to be also creepily plausible. (The sequence was realised by Casper Kelly, the director of Too Many Cooks, a horror-comedy short that went viral in 2014.)
It is against this backdrop that Cage gives his best performance since Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant in 2009: the 54-year-old actor recently branded himself “the California Klaus Kinski”, only semi-jokingly, and it is now clear that he requires a Kinskistrength collaborator behind the camera: a Herzog, or a David Lynch, or a Michael Bay, or a Panos Cosmatos.
There is an extraordinary sequence in which a heartbroken Red blunders into the bathroom, guzzles vodka and goes deranged with grief in a manner that recalled the way Popeye used to squeeze open a tin of spinach. This is a film that exists in its own supremely unnerving dimension: the dictionary definition of Not For Everyone, maybe, but a required trip for everyone else. RC