Mandy
Almost immediately as I was watching Panos Costamos’s “Mandy,” I immediately thought of Clive Barker’s films. The same type of occult horror that Barker did in his films is front-and-center in “Mandy’s” first half, when we have the scene set for us of a couple in the Northwest, it looks like, before they get set upon by a cult that turns their life upside down, and puts Nicolas Cage on a crazy path of vengeance.
This film has been on my radar, and the radar of many film fans, since it debuted at Sundance in January, where it was fantastically praised as one of Nic Cage’s best films in years. That’s quite a load to put on a film. If I don’t exactly love it like many other people do, it’s more that it didn’t reach those expectations. When I can, however, I definitely want to own this movie so that I can rewatch it, and just suck in what Costamos has going on.
The film is set in 1983, and is broken up into three chapters. The first one focuses on the idyllic life of Red Miller (Cage) and Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough). Normally, a film of this nature paints such an idea in as bright of visual terms as possible, but Costamos’s film is drenched in darkness and light as if out of a lava lamp. And while the score by the late Johann Johannsson- the great Icelandic composer behind “Arrival” and “The Theory of Everything”- has some beautiful passages to it, this is a dark affair even before Mandy catches the eye of cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache), who must have her. The couple is then torn apart after Mandy stands up to Sand’s advances, and Red, who was left for dead, is fueled by his rage to go after the cult.
“Mandy” was my first interaction with Costamos’s work, and I’m curious about what else he’s done. He has a fascinating eye for visuals that his cinematographer (Benjamin Loeb) captures into a nightmare vision of life, which is amplified by the striking score by Johannsson. The film’s first half is slow-moving and hard to really invest in until the cult comes up on Red and Mandy, but after that moment, and Red is on his own, the film accelerates into a hard-core revenge thriller that unleashes the mania Cage is best known for. Let’s be clear- this is not a fully-formed dramatic performance by Cage; as with the rest of the characters, Red is more of an archetype that Costamos and his co-writer, Aaron Stewart-Ahn, is putting into a waking dream. The film feels as though it exists for the madness of Cage’s performance in the second half of this year, and it’s a ferocious turn from the actor. If you want Cage unleashed, this is it, and that’s always something worth celebrating in a movie.
I mentioned Clive Barker’s films- which include “Hellraiser,” “Nightbreed” and “Lord of Illusions”- as a comparison point for “Mandy,” but the truth is, this is unlike any movie we’ve seen out of the horror genre. There are plenty more that deal with similar ideas, but none of them have the stark, haunted imagination Costamos puts on display here. I haven’t hit on all of the plot points along the way in this film, but it’s worth watching this film for yourself, and immersing yourself in it, to experience this surreal story for yourself. I cannot wait to do so again.
