Mandy (2018)

Directed by: Panos Cosmatos | 121 minutes | action, horror | Actors: Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Ned Dennehy, Olwen Fouéré, Richard Brake, Bill Duke, Line Pillet, Clément Baronnet, Alexis Julemont, Stephan Fraser, Ivailo Dimitrov, Hayley Saywell

Lumberjack Red Miller and his wife Mandy Bloom lead a secluded life in the forests along the American West Coast. They are averse to material desires and spend their days mostly in each other’s arms, while philosophizing about the planets and the cosmos or enjoying a drink, fantasy books and pulp films. But their peaceful life is shattered when Mandy accidentally bumps into cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) while on a walk in the woods. Unable to take his mind off Mandy anymore, Sand summons a band of demonic motorcycle demons to kidnap the object of his desires. The action, however, has horrific consequences and ultimately forms the prelude to a carnage of epic proportions.

Anyone who has seen the film ‘Beyond the Black Rainbow’ will know that Panos Cosmatos is a director who does not shy away from an experimental approach. Also in ‘Mandy’ his predilection for the floating and dreamy shines through clearly. This is especially apparent during the first acts, which are characterized by the frequent use of red, blue and green color filters, cinematic aids that give the predominantly meandering scenes a hallucinatory air. The brooding and bizarre atmosphere that this creates also ensures that the horror scenes in this separate horror epic feel just a bit more uncomfortable and gloomy.

‘Mandy’ starts out as abstract, deadly serious and hard to digest movie house material, but gradually changes into a fairly straightforward revenge film that makes full use of tried-and-true horror camp. That change of tone gives Nicolas Cage the opportunity to pull out all the stops in the role of Red Miller and indulge in a hysterical outburst of grief and rage. Under the influence of a ditch of liquor and a dose of super LSD, Miller turns into a ruthless avenging angel. The blood flows abundantly in the second part of ‘Mandy’, resulting in a stylistically beautiful and quite plastic horror film that undoubtedly ended up in the lower video library shelves with cult horror in the eighties of the last century.

‘Mandy’ is a film full of paradoxes: at times abstract, pretentious, slow, beautiful, sad and a bit vague, but at other times blunt, rock hard, manic, straightforward and almost laughable. The result is an outrageous cocktail that will delight fans of the slasher genre as well as lovers of more sophisticated and ‘arty’ horror films (think of the work of Dario Argento or Mario Bava, for example).