Once every few years Nicolas Cage refreshes his mystique with a performance that radiates energy like a city on fire. Nearly a decade since Cage’s last such turn (in Werner Herzog’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans“), he goes way out into some previously undiscovered zone for the fantasy/horror face-melt head trip “Mandy.” Through Cage, the film’s straightforward revenge plot becomes a King Crimson album played at half speed and twice normal volume; a bizarre and bloody outing with a strong heart beneath the surface.
“Mandy” is one of the most metal movies ever made. Superficially, it has roots twisting into fantasy novels and horror movies, fuelling the film’s heavy, strange “nightmare in the woods” aesthetic. The second outing from “Beyond the Black Rainbow” writer/director Panos Cosmatos shares visual elements with his debut: hyper-saturated colors, particularly red; oblique shots that emphasize tone and texture; a sense of experience rather than narrative.
This is also a relationship drama in demon’s clothes, and “Mandy” is more accomplished than Cosmatos’s first film on every front. Rather than a devotion to object details, Cosmatos and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb focus on faces as they experience the film’s oddities and terrors. Cage is a fixation, of course, and co-star Andrea Riseborough is a particular fascination. Fitted with contacts and often captured in crimson light, she’s got the slightly unearthly allure of Shelley Duvall in “The Shining.”
Cage plays Red, who with his wife Mandy (Riseborough) lives near a lake. (Crystal Lake, actually, which should hint at some inclinations.) Theirs is a large, heavily windowed home, seemingly in harmony with the surroundings. Their bond is solid, but Red isn’t entirely comfortable deep in the woods. His fears are borne out when a Manson-like cult leader sets his sights on Mandy. Soon the lakeside home is attacked by armored and possibly supernatural bikers who take Mandy into their custody, setting Red off on, for lack of a better term, a quest.
Homage and pastiche have become keystone elements of genre film, and Mandy has no shortage of nods to past horrors. (See the Crystal Lake mention above.) Its dominant mode, however, is sincerity. Red and Mandy’s relationship may be a fantasy, but it is a mature one. They’re quiet with one another; mindful, adoring.
Cage’s performance is as generous in tranquil moments as it is outsized late in the movie. He gives much of the first half of the film over to Riseborough, but when he is present he’s attentive. He’ll play in the background of a scene, while remaining actively invested in what Riseborough is doing. It’s not the sort of work we often see from Cage, and it’s nothing like the uncontained emotional explosion we expect from some of his wilder work.
The second half of the film is that explosion in slow motion, and it’s wild. “Mandy” never speeds up but it does go into a stony, intense overdrive as Red goes deep into a counterculture nightmare of cult goons and drug-destroyed bikers.
Cage’s physically staggering, emotionally raw work in the back half is enough to generate a career’s worth of reputation in a single hour. He kicks and fights and contorts but really it’s a single long take that dominates the movie. In that 45 seconds or so – which feels like minutes on first viewing and goes by entirely too quickly on rewatch – Cage all but vomits his emotions into a small bathroom. In the context of an action/horror film you don’t expect to see a take so vulnerable it provokes nervous audience laughter, but that’s precisely what makes “Mandy” stand out.
There’s ample drive for that emotion. Cosmatos and crew, with co-writer Aaron Stewart-Ahn, create a fetishistic set of villains which “Mandy” treats like the shark in “Jaws,” showing just enough to convey a threat, and rarely enough to dispel danger. Between drugs delivered by wasp sting and Linus Roache’s alarmingly persuasive turn as the cosmically narcissistic cult leader is a whole spectrum of evil for Cage to wade through.
The only easy things in this movie are the handful of pop-culture artifacts wormed into the walls. A comic relief TV commercial remakes a shot from “Apocalypse Now,” using macaroni and cheese; the bikers are better Cenobites than most of the “Hellraiser” sequels have created; a key shot of the android Ash in “Alien” is interpolated for a big sequence. Animated sequences echo fantasy novel covers and the movie “Heavy Metal” in equal measure.
Johann Johansson scores the film with waves of synths and titanic guitar chords played by Stephen O’Malley of Sunn 0))), and Johansson’s musical voice defines the film’s character – what could have been driven as an assault is instead surprisingly warm.
“Mandy” is not for everyone, but for a willing and engaged audience this is a rare artifact, a warped “hearts of darkness” journey into loss and out the other side. [A-]
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