Mandy

Mandy (from Weird and Wonderful II: Fifty More Cult Films by George Hughes, available from www.freefall-productions.com)

2018 / US / 121 minutes

“For a while now, word’s been coming down that there’s something dark and fearsome out there…”

Director: Panos Cosmatos / Screenplay: Panos Cosmatos and Aaron Stewart-Ahn / Director of Photography: Benjamin Loeb / Music: Johann Johannsson / Production: Martin Metz, Daniel Noah, Adrian Politowski and Elijah Wood for XYZ Films / Cast: Nicolas Cage (Red Miller), Andrea Riseborough (Mandy Bloom), Linus Roache (Jeremiah Sand), Bill Duke (Caruthers), Ned Dennehy (Brother Swan), Clement Baronnet (Brother Klopek), Alexis Julemont (Brother Hanker).

The Shadow Mountains, 1983. Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) lives in a small cabin in the woods with his younger, artist girlfriend, Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough). Red works as a logger while Mandy is a cashier at a remote gas station. From what we see of Red and Mandy’s interactions, it seems that he is a recovering alcoholic and likely a traumatised Vietnam veteran and that she probably came from an abusive background before they escaped to their quiet, anonymous life together.

   When a travelling hippy cult pass through the woods, their leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) develops an obsession with Mandy after seeing her walking on the roadside. The cult then summon the Black Skulls, a cannibalistic biker gang apparently driven insane by a bad batch of LSD, to assist with abducting Mandy. But when a drugged Mandy is brought to Sand, she ridicules the cult leader’s psychedelic folk music.

   Flying into an uncontrollable rage, Sand tortures Red and has Mandy burned alive in front of him. The cult then disappear as Mandy’s ashes blow away, leaving Red behind. In agony and driven to the edge of insanity, Red collects his crossbow, “The Reaper”, from his friend- and likely fellow veteran- Caruthers (Bill Duke) who tells him about the Black Skulls and Sand’s cult, the Children of the New Dawn.

   Forging an axe to arm himself with along with the reaper, Red sets out to find the biker gang and the cult. Although Caruthers warns him that his chances against either are not good and that he will likely die, Red has nothing left to lose and leaves in search of vengeance anyway.

   Panos Cosmatos, the son of ’80’s Action director George P. Cosmatos (Rambo: First Blood, Part II, Cobra), fashioned an unforgettably surreal and terrifying cinematic experience with Mandy. An unapologetically artsy and hallucinogenic exercise in atmosphere, the film has a deliberately slow and unnerving build-up. Cage is initially very restrained and at first it seems like Red is going to be one of his quieter, underplayed roles.

   But after what turns out to have been an hour long pre- title sequence, everything goes straight through the roof and Cage fully lets rip the way he hasn’t since Wild at Heart (1990), pulling what can only be described as Nicolas Cage faces as he downs a bottle of vodka in his pants before battling (quite possibly literal) demons on a roaring rampage of revenge.

   Cage was getting divorced as filming started and later explained that the experience partially inspired his interpretation of the character: “It was a shocker for me- I didn’t see it coming and those feelings had to go somewhere, so they went into my performance”. But as devastating as Cage is in Mandy, Andrea Riseborough is also hauntingly heartbreaking in the title role and Bill Duke makes borderline ludicrous dialogue in his warning about the Black Skulls sound genuinely frightening.

   Then there’s Linus Roache as the obviously Charles Manson- like Sand, a failed musician whose worst acts are triggered by criticism of his art (like Manson, he also refers to his followers as “Children” and his victims as “Pigs”). All this adds up to one of the most original Horror experiences in recent memory, although Mandy certainly isn’t a film for everyone.

   Interestingly, Cosmatos had originally envisioned the film as being a generational battle and had wanted Cage to play Sand with a younger actor as Red. However, Cage took more of an interest in the heroic role and convinced the director to rewrite it for him.

   Whilst Sand is still presented as a relic of the ’60’s, the rest of the film is hugely influenced by the era in which the elder Cosmatos made his name (although, since the death of George Cosmatos in 2005, both Sylvester Stallone and Kurt Russell have both claimed they used him more as a “Ghost Director” for films they effectively helmed themselves with Cobra and Tombstone, respectively).

   Mandy opens with a King Crimson track (Starless from the album Red) and the film is littered with references to ’70’s and ’80’s Sci- Fi and Fantasy with Red discussing his favourite comic books and with Mandy’s books and paintings. The Black Skulls even appear in the room the same way the very similar Cenobites do in Clive Barker’s original Hellraiser (1987).

   Panos Cosmatos has said in interviews that the film’s unique look was influenced by imagery and stories he’d come up with himself as a child after being inspired by the VHS artwork for SF, Fantasy and Horror films he wasn’t allowed to watch at the time. This is a classic example of the idea that, for creative people (especially young, potential creatives), there’s often nowhere scarier than the inside of your own head.