Italian-Canadian film-maker Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy (2018) is
a lean and blunt phantasmagorical feature, permeated with absorbing candy-colored
nightmarish sequences. The narrative is set against a pine forest and the
central characters live in a wondrous wood-house, in harmony with the
environment near a placid lake. It kind of takes the story out of the real and
places it in a metaphorical scene. Furthermore, the exercise in high style and
archetypal landscape produces an artistic lens to observe the violence and
visceral madness far removed from reality. Of course, Mandy is decadent, gory,
and ludicrous. Yet it’s uniquely psychedelic visuals combined with perfectly channeled mad-dog performance of Nicolas Cage offers a satisfying surrealistic
revenge flick.
Mandy starts off as a pastiche, but thanks to seriously
bizarre and hypnotizing visual delights Mr. Cosmatos transcends the pastiche
into a marvelous midnight movie that’s worth a cult following. The setup here
is that Red Miller (Nicolas Cage), a lumberjack, leads a quiet life with his
eponymous wife/girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), a skinny young woman who
has the haunted looks of Shelley Duvall (‘3 Women’, ‘The Shinning’). The year
is 1983 and he is tattooed and has the looks of a ruffian, while she sports a big facial scar to suggest some kind of encounter with violence. Although we
never quite come to understand how they found each other, we could
instinctually feel that Red and Mandy are tragic, downcast figures who have attained solace by removing themselves from
civilization. The literal and metaphorical isolation intensifies the perfection
of their match. When Red’s at work, Mandy focuses on her weird fantasy art with impeccable other worldliness.
As expected, the couples’ blissful, idyllic existence is
interrupted by ‘Jesus-freaks-cum-weirdo-hippie-types’. Mandy catches the
attention of the leader of a LSD-fueled religious cult named Jeremiah (Linus Roache). With the help of a coven of demonic bikers (known as ‘Black
Skulls’), the Manson-esque cult leader abducts Mandy and wreaks infernal pain
upon Red. When Jeremiah’s attempts to seduce Mandy go wrong, the inevitable
thing happens. Up until now, the fever dream of a narrative moves deliberately
slow, imparted with tinseled image and gorgeous retro score. Then Nicolas
Cage’s Red is set loose. It is indicated in the scene where Cage’s Red, wearing
only underpants and a t-shirt with an image of a fierce tiger, gulps vodka
in a bathroom, weeping and hollering at the same time and gradually preparing himself
for the unrelenting journey for vengeance. Red fires himself up with drugs,
forges an axe-knife weapon combo and travels into the heart of craziness. The
path might be very conventional in terms of narrative, but willing audiences
might find twisted sort of relish in observing the crushed, severed heads, the chainsaw combat, etc.
Shot in hot ochre, scarlet red and cool blue, with
its near-mute protagonist avenging for his soulmate, Mandy has the plot of a grind-house feature, but it's paced like a restrained art-house work. Not all viewers
might find it easy to get into the film-makers’ head-space and process the
assortment of delightful imagery on its own terms (those who do will definitely be raving about it). Although Mandy derives a lot from
70s/80 occult-horror and infested with Lynchian aura, the very recent point of references could be Nicolas
Winding Refn’s films. Furthermore, it looks like a fitting companion piece to Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge. But unlike ‘Revenge’ (a
wildly different take on rape-revenge flicks like ‘I Spit on Your Grave’),
Mandy isn’t a revised taken on the traditional self-destroying hero.
Eventually, Cosmatos’ movie is about nothing other than Nicolas Cage gritting
his teeth in rage. Mandy is as much a heavy and warm nostalgia special like
Stranger Things. Only that Cosmatos’ nostalgia for the 80s is grimy, twisted,
and backed up by sick sense of humor. Whether it is chainsaw deaths or gruesome
decapitations, Nicolas Cage’s staggering, over-the-top performance adds a
palatable zestfulness to the proceedings. The late Icelandic composer Johann Johannson’s ominous doom-metal influenced soundtrack also perfectly sets the film’s
engrossingly decadent tone without ever assaulting our senses.
With fantastically effective sci-fi ‘Beyond the Black
Rainbow’ and mesmerizing cult horror ‘Mandy’, Panos Cosmatos has strongly
elevated himself into an intriguing schlock auteur. Cosmatos's
eye for constructing the look of films is highly commendable, even though the
meaning derived from his flicks are largely opaque and nonsensical.
Trailer
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