‘Mandy’ Review: Nicolas Cage’s Twisted Riff On ‘John Wick’ Is A Gnarly Acid-Trip [Sundance]
By Ben Pearson/Jan. 21, 2018 10:30 am EST
Mandy, the sophomore feature from Beyond the Black Rainbow director Panos Cosmatos, is another full-on plunge into a kaleidoscopic nightmare. It’s 1983, and Cage plays Red, a lumberjack who lives in a secluded cabin in the woods with his artist girlfriend Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), who spends her days reading fantasy paperbacks with covers that look like heavy metal albums. Mandy catches the eye of a crazed cult leader (Linus Roache), who conjures a group of motorcycle-riding demons to kidnap her.
The phrase “slow burn” isn’t strong enough to describe the glacial pacing of this film’s first half: it’s more like a simmering volcano waiting to accumulate enough pressure to erupt. Cosmatos crafts a unique cinematic atmosphere by playing with color saturations and drenching the film in swaths of bright red and green lights, so even gorehounds should be entertained by the stylistic touches while they wait for the shit to inevitably hit the fan.
But the style can’t fully counterbalance the movie’s indulgent length. It drags on with speech after speech from the villainous cult nut jobs, including an interminable seduction scene that ends with a drugged Mandy bitterly laughing at the cult leader’s attempt to woo her. Cage’s Red disappears for a significant stretch of the movie, and while some might argue that his absence is a trade off for establishing Mandy’s character so we feel Red’s pain more acutely later on, he’s so spellbinding when he’s on screen that it may not be a worthwhile trade.
While Cage gets his John Wick moment to hunt down evil opponents, the film’s gnarly gore that flows in the second half is probably more akin to the heightened excesses of Hobo with a Shotgun. It took Cosmatos seven years to get this movie made, and once you see it, you’ll understand why. Mandy is a totally uncompromising vision from a singular filmmaker – a pulsing, twisted descent into heavy metal vengeance that must be seen to be believed.
/Film Rating: 7 out of 10
