Revenge films are a notoriously simplistic and manipulative sub-genre, so it takes something unexpected for a “They killed my wife!” action-thriller to move the needle for me. Mandy – with its unhinged Nicolas Cage performance, coke-snorting demon bikers, chainsaw duels, and Bill Duke cameo – took that proverbial needle, filled it with pure cinematic heroin, and injected it directly into my veins. Directed by Panos Cosmatos, Mandy is pulsating, drug-induced midnight madness which rivals John Wick in its off-kilter world-building. It’s essentially a two hour adaptation of the cover art for a lurid, pulp sci-fi paperback or a crazy ass 1981 prog rock album.
Shockingly enough, Mandy actually represents a step towards conventional filmmaking for Cosmatos, whose previous film was the bizarre Rob-Zombie-goes-arthouse horror offering Beyond the Black Rainbow. However, Cosmatos retains Beyond…‘s blue-and-red saturated, new wave visual aesthetic to great effect (both films are set in the ‘80s and operate, to some degree, as cryptic satires of Reagan era social conservatism). Cage, as always, is here to eat a huge fucking ham sandwich, but there is an undeniable power to scenes like the one in which he expresses traumatic grief by scream-chugging his way through a bottle of vodka.
Mandy is self-consciously gonzo with an eagerness that, at times, can undermine its intent. But Cosmatos’s enthralling style, combined with a plot that allows for plenty of laugh-out-loud insanity, makes Mandy one of the wildest and most irresistible films of the year.
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