Mandy

The first image of Nicolas Cage in Mandy is as a lumberjack, using a chainsaw against a tree, and I said aloud, "I hope that's Chekov's chainsaw." It ought to be a sin to show Nicolas Cage using a chainsaw at the start of a movie and not have him use it as part of his “Roaring Rampage of Revenge.”

Thankfully, Cage does get to use it against the villains who harmed him and his wife. You have to wait a while before he does, but much like the rest of the film, the payoff is worth the wait

Mandy is a strange beast. Cage plays Red Miller, who lives a secluded lifestyle with his wife Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough). They run afoul of a weird hippie cult led by Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), who becomes obsessed with Mandy and orders his underlings to bring her to him.

We've seen this kind of story hundreds of times, but Mandy is not a gritty, vigilante action piece. It is a nightmarish, surreal horror thriller. It plays very dream-like, and director Panos Cosmatos's style gives the movie a freaky, acid-trip quality.

 
For example, to kidnap Mandy, Jeremiah's cult makes a bargain with the Black Skulls, a drug-addled biker gang. The Black Skulls resemble Cenobites on motorcycles with their leather outfits and S&M fixtures. They practice cannibalism, take a highly potent form of LSD, and accept one of Jeremiah's low-level cultists as a sacrifice as part of the deal. They feel apocalyptic and dangerous, straight out of a Mad Max-like horror universe.

Mandy doesn't rush its narrative. It unfolds with Cosmatos piling on hallucinatory effects. He bathes the screen in colors - often red - and uses a lot of slow motion. When the drugged up Mandy meets Jeremiah, the movement on screen is blurry. Elsewhere, Cosmatos uses dissolves, bleeding images into each other, suggesting a hellish netherworld. The score by Johan Johannsson, his last before his death, also adds to the atmosphere by being eerie and at times droning and clashing.

The movie, in its own way, also establishes the sweet relationship between Red and Mandy. They feel like a couple that has lived together for a long time and are comfortable together. Cage has relatively little dialogue in the first half of the movie, but the routine and physical intimacy between the two suggest a strong connection. Yet, it's also foreboding, the calm before the storm.

Make no mistake: this is a violent, gory movie. Ghastly things happen to just about everyone. The plot elements feel like something straight from a sleazy, 70s grindhouse picture, but Cosmatos is very much an arthouse filmmaker in the style of Nicolas Winding Refn. It's a challenging picture as a result, but the strange marriage works on its chosen level.

Mandy is also funny, in a hushed, shocked sort of way. When Red returns home after a traumatic incident, he sees a commercial featuring a goblin puppet vomiting macaroni and cheese onto children; it's so weird and random. Also, Jeremiah attempts to seduce Mandy with a song he recorded as a failed singer, and it is a hilariously bad folk song (no wonder his music career died).

Now, can someone get Cage and Cosmatos to adapt to Manhunt?