Mandy – first look review

In his fol­low-up to 2010’s Beyond the Black Rain­bow, direc­tor Panos Cos­matos teams up with writer Aaron Stew­art-Ahn to cre­ate a seri­ous­ly weird and vio­lent trip. At first, the world of Mandy is incred­i­bly dark, but the film is soon dipped in Day-Glo acid colours. Lights and fil­ters splash reds, yel­lows, greens and blues to over­sat­u­rate the screen. It’s a dis­ori­ent­ing, almost hyp­no­tis­ing effect.

1983; a remote cor­ner of the world. Red (Cage) is a qui­et lum­ber­jack who cracks cheesy Erik Estra­da jokes with his wife, Mandy (Andrea Rise­bor­ough). Although we nev­er quite learn every­thing about her, she’s an obvi­ous trag­ic fig­ure, com­plete with a semi-per­ma­nent down­cast look and a scar run­ning down her face. When Red’s not around, she keeps to her fan­ta­sy art, the kind you might expect to see embla­zoned on the side of a metalhead’s van.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, their bliss is inter­rupt­ed by a psy­cho­sex­u­al cult resem­bling the Man­son Fam­i­ly. The group cru­el­ly mur­ders Mandy in front of Red, who then launch­es into the revenge movie every­one has come out to watch.

Just as the build-up to the blood­shed takes its sweet time, so does Red’s path to revenge. His aim takes a detour away from the mur­der­ous cult and onto some masked motor­cy­cle gang, delay­ing the much more grat­i­fy­ing sequences of retal­i­a­tion. Anoth­er dis­ap­point­ment is Mandy’s role as a sac­ri­fi­cial lamb – espe­cial­ly giv­en that the film bares her name. Her sole pur­pose here is to serve as moti­va­tion for some­one else’s actions. She reap­pears in ani­mat­ed dream sequences, first as a spec­tre haunt­ing Red’s sleep, then as a siren call­ing to her man to vio­lent­ly avenge her grue­some death.

The true star of Mandy is obvi­ous­ly Cage, who gives a won­der­ful­ly unhinged per­for­mance. He chan­nels his man­ic ener­gy from Snake Eyes and deranged stares from Face/​Off to ric­o­chet from one bloody scene to the next. Which in this film’s case, usu­al­ly means that he is also bathed in some sort of a vivid red light, so that even the parts of his cloth­ing and face which aren’t cov­ered with blood appear to be so. Red’s arc is tru­ly stuff of mid­night movie legend.

At var­i­ous points, Cage’s char­ac­ter plunges nose-first into a base­ball size mound of cocaine, freaks out in a bath­room while neck­ing a bot­tle of alco­hol, and bat­tle a cult mem­ber with a chain­saw. Mandy might not be everyone’s idea of a sat­is­fy­ing night­cap, but this sur­re­al­is­tic revenge flick will like­ly earn a loy­al fol­low­ing of its own.