Movie Review: The Nightmarish "Mandy" Gives Nicolas Cage Good Reason to Go Wild Again

**Nicolas Cage is relentless, starring in as many movies as memes. Mandy is his best in eons.**

When it comes time, at year’s end, to collate the best cinematic moments of 2018, it will be tough to pick a favourite between a) Nicolas Cage, in his underwear, scream-crying between gasping slugs of vodka; b) Nicolas Cage hallucinating his own face-melting; and c) Nicolas Cage in a chainsaw-fight.

Why pick individual moments when I can just celebrate Mandy—the container for those new, cherished memories—as a whole? It’s a singular experience, and the best thing Cage has been affiliated with since (*scrolls through IMDB*)… okay, it appears he has made 34 movies this decade alone and I cannot set an authoritative benchmark having only seen eight of them. (You sit through Left Behind.) Cage isn’t a picky actor, nor always a correctly-calibrated one, but through either careful planning or random selection, this collaboration with writer-director Panos Cosmatos is wild and magical.

Mandy—cowritten by Aaron Stewart-Ahn—puts Cage to good use by calling upon his trademark mania to enliven an otherwise standard 'payback' plotline. It also plants him in a psychedelic environment that makes his performance feel relatively reasonable, given the circumstances. He plays Red, a lumberjack living in isolation near the Californian Shadow Mountains with his artist girlfriend Mandy (a tender Andrea Riseborough). When she’s kidnapped by a hippie cult, he takes violent revenge. Cue: scream-crying, chainsaws, et cetera. The inevitable YouTube supercuts are no doubt being edited as we speak.

However, Mandy deserves more than to be consumed as a four-minute video complication, unlike say, The Wicker Man. This is something special, and occasionally powerful; a demonstration of sublime auteurial control that is also totally rabid. (It’s even quite funny, with a mid-movie interlude from Too Many Cooks wizard Chris Kelly that defies written description.)

Cosmatos isn’t exploring the banality of evil, but the otherworldliness of it, leaning into the unearthly. When Mandy reads a sci-fi novel about crimson skies, the world turns bloodshot. Later, while failed singer and current cult leader Jeremiah (Linus Roache) spies Mandy and demands her kidnapping, his followers summon a demonic trio of hellraisers. A potent pot of LSD and a communion with Christ are both teased as explanations for the chaos, yet seeking literal meaning is missing the forest for the trees. What would it look like if your world turned to hell? Here, you see. And then you see Nic Cage bringing hell to hippies.

Though the latter half of the picture focuses on the base pleasures of 'Cage rage', and his resulting bloodletting, the first half is a thoughtful character-driven mood piece, introducing Mandy and hinting at her history of trauma and resilient survival, with the cult of Jeremiah Sand looming. (Think Fire Walk With Manson.) Sensitive and sense-shattering, Mandy isn’t simply a masterpiece: it’s two for the price of one.

5/5

Mandy is screening in select cinemas across the country as part of Monster Fest. Get dates here. It’s rated MA15+ for strong horror themes, bloody violence, drug use, sex and nudity.