By
Kelly M. Hudson
This is High Weirdness.
And blood. Lots of blood. Juicy, spitting, gushing, spraying, blood.
How to summarize this? Mandy is either a drug-fueled trip into a nightmarish fantasy world or it’s a real-life trip into a nightmarish fantasy world, or it’s neither or both. I guess you get to decide. I’m still trying to make up my mind on that bit, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter. What we have here is a film that doesn’t play it safe and that pushes the language of cinematic storytelling in ways that it doesn’t get pushed much anymore. So yeah, of course I liked it.
Nicolas Cage plays Red, a lumberjack who also lives out in a magical forest with an odd but beautiful lady named Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) who is an excellent artist, loves to read fantasy novels, and has a scar on her face and one pupil larger than the other. She reminded me of a fairy-type creature. Well, they’re deeply in love and live an almost idyllic existence, until a weird, fascist cult leader shows up and decides that Mandy must belong to him. He orders his cult to kidnap her by employing a gang of bikers that are either otherworldly or just so blitzed on LSD that they don’t know the difference. These guys look like they emerged from a chamber of Hell that the Cenobites don’t bother to visit, and they take Mandy and Red. She laughs at the cult leader when he displays his penis with pride and then the leader, butt-hurt and embarrassed, burns Mandy alive in front of a shackled Red. All that is just the first forty minutes or so of the movie. What follows is Red gearing up like he’s in a video game and going after his revenge. And he gets it. There’s a chainsaw duel, lots of blood, crossbow action, beheading, lots more blood, gushing blood, Nicolas Cage delivering some of the lines of his life, and oh yeah, more blood.
The film by Panos Cosmatos is a visual feast. It’s like eating cotton candy that’s actually, secretly made of broccoli but you can’t taste it; all you can savor is the sugary delight. Which in a roundabout way means that it’s really good for you even though you don’t know it. There’s mucho weirdo dialogue and the acting is fantastic. Riseborough is terrific in her role as Mandy and Linus Roache as cult leader Jeremiah Sand is magnificent as the insufferable, childish, and chilling creator of death and destruction. Cage is pretty damned awesome, too, especially in the earlier parts, where his acting is silent but powerful. Later, as things turn more and more obscenely surreal, he starts doing his Nic Cage thing, and for me, this was my only quibble with the film. I wish they’d dialed him back some, but even so, the moments and lines are maybe too precious to jettison. It just pulled me out of the reality of the movie a couple of time. No big deal, just a quibble, and my quibble I’m sure will be the reason many love the film.
And what’s not to love? Like I said before: High Weirdness, the kind and type we just don’t get anymore. This is a film I can’t recommend enough, if you’re into this sort of thing. If not, steer clear. Mandy is a psychedelic trip of the heart, full of love and darkness, violence and passion.
3 ½ Stars out of 4