I feel like Scrat from Ice Age would love Mandy because this movie is absolutely nuts. The newest directorial effort from filmmaker Panos Cosmatos, Mandy can be best summed up as being the demented spawn of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives and John Wick. Though it may echo two other recent features, and its editing and atmosphere certainly evoke past auteurs of dream-like motion pictures like David Lynch, make no mistake about it, Mandy is very much a one-of-a-kind creation that constantly had me either questioning what the hell I was even watching or cheering on the mayhem transpiring on-screen. It's two hours of the most excellent kind of madness, the kind that was tailor-made for Nicolas Cage's gifts as an actor.
In a Q&A session (hosted by Kevin Smith) that followed my screening of Mandy, Cosmatos explicitly detailed how Mandy was dictated more by visuals in his head or moods he wanted to convey rather than a traditional narrative he wanted to tell, something that very much comes through in the final product which is dictated primarily by extremely heightened pieces of atmosphere and imagery. However, there is a storyline in Mandy guiding those elements, one concerning happy romantic couple Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) and Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough), who find their lives entirely upended when Mandy catches the fancy of cult leader Jeremiah Sanders (Linus Roache), who immediately demands that his followers bring Mandy to him.
Mandy, however, refuses to go along with this plan, incurring the wrath of Sanders in the process, who proceeds to enact vengeance on Mandy and Red. In the wake of this gruesome carnage, the previously mild-mannered Red begins a bloody quest for vengeance. This is a story broken up into basically two halves, with the first half being a slower-paced piece that's meant to establish the tranquil life of Red and Mandy while also showing the selfish insanity that fuels the existence of Jeremiah and his followers. It's technically table-setting but Cosmatos has such evocative imagery to share with the world that it becomes the best possible kind of table-setting, one that allows for visually powerful scenes like Mandy's dream of coming across a dead animal in the woods to really get across what informs these characters and their personalities.
This first half of Mandy is far from devoid of over-the-top elements, far from it, but it's a more methodical creature that's more concerned with capturing numerous monologues (Riseborough and Roache each get at least one) in single takes and even violent moments like the burning of a corpse have a subdued melancholy to them that's incredibly haunting. Much of that power comes from the striking imagery seen all throughout Mandy, with the feature making it clear right away that there'll be a real versatility to the visual palette of this production. Unlike, say, Ozark, which drowns every scene in a color-graded blue hue, Mandy uses a wide array of colors, including super bright colors (yay for pink getting used!), to convey the various moods of individual scenes. Just in the way colors are used, never even mind the exemplary camerawork and shot compositions, demonstrates how imaginative Mandy is on a visual level, it's a movie that's got weird as hell images it wants to bring to life just as they are and it does just that with masterful aplomb.
The evocative visuals of Mandy very much get carried over into the second half of the story which....oh man, the second half of Mandy.
This movie gets so so so unhinged.
If you thought Mandy had been demented up to its midway point, suddenly Nicolas Cage goes on a vengeance-fueled warpath and everything just goes to a whole other level of lunacy. The sexually-informed violent imagery just never stops coming and there are all kinds of delightfully ludicrous action sequences (the chainsaw fight is destined to be iconic). Writers Panos Cosmatos and Aaron Stewart-Ahn just go to town on the mayhem Red dishes out in his quest for revenge and it's a sight to behold, especially since it's all filtered through the movies idiosyncratic visual sensibilities. If you're like me and are a die-hard fan of both enjoyable action fare and masterful cinematography, then Mandy is gonna be like catnip for you, I know I was certainly engrossed with everything that was happening on-screen.
Perhaps the most powerful scene in Mandy though may be one of its most restrained sequences. It's one that sees a pantsless Red, shortly after Mandy has been killed, stumble into his cheerfully colored bathroom (which looks like it was designed by Wes Anderson), grab a bottle of vodka from one of the bathroom cabinets and then proceed to cry and wail in agony. People at my screening were snickering at the scene but I found myself incredibly moved by what I was watching. Nicolas Cage just goes all-in for a raw and uncompromised depiction of what it's like to process the loss of a loved one here and it's immensely powerful to watch. Cage is in top-notch form for all of Mandy, but that bathroom scene with Cage channeling such an unnervingly accurate portrait of coping with grief may be one of my favorite pieces of acting from him ever,.
Linus Roache's performance as Jeremiah Sand is another highlight of the whole demented project, his riveting scenery chewing shows an audacious level of commitment and, like Cage's aforementioned bathroom sequence, channels discernable realistic traits of toxic masculinity in his depiction of a man who believes he's entitled to women as property (he's like a more down-to-Earth version of Immortan Joe). The performances from Cage and Roache, like the visuals of Mandy, are the kind of thing that astound you while you're watching the movie and then capture your mind for days afterward. Panos Cosmatos has delivered an avant-garde descent into violent chaos whose impeccable craftsmanship is just outstanding to soak in.
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