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Mandy Is a New Cult Classic for the Ages

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Mandy Is a New Cult Classic for the Ages

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Mandy Is a New Cult Classic for the Ages

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Published on September 26, 2018

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There must be something terribly similar happening in the current climate, to see so much ironic 1980s nostalgia in genre movies lately.

Set very pointedly during the Reagan era, Italian-Canadian director Panos Cosmatos’ latest film, Mandy, is a giant, nightmarish middle finger to the misguided hippie years that ushered in the even worse infestation of the yuppie. The antidote to all of this failed ideology? Pure heavy metal. And why the hell not?

But Mandy is more than just a vivid and unrelenting ode to a Boris Vallejo painting. It’s even more than peak Nic Cage in a chainsaw battle. Though that alone is pretty noteworthy.

Mandy is also about a woman. Mostly.

Spoilers and King Crimson after the cut.

Panos Cosmatos’ first feature film, Beyond the Black Rainbow, was divisive, less of a commercial success than the kind of movie film nerds love. Also set in 1983 and a spiritual companion to Mandy, Cosmatos created a mesmerising ode to Cronenberg and Kubrick in a twisty sci-fi thriller with a killer synth score, but the style alone couldn’t keep the overall story from being muddled. Mandy has no such problems; it’s an extremely simple revenge story elevated into something satisfying and even beautiful because of Cosmatos’ deliberate excesses and a few stellar surprises.

Red (Cage) is a stoic lumberjack in a kinda-sorta Pacific Northwest logging community. His girlfriend is a younger woman with long black hair, a pair of period-perfect eyeglasses, and a love of fantasy art. We know nothing much about them, like how they met, how Mandy got the scar under her eye, or why they choose to live in an isolated cabin with walls mostly made of windows, a beautiful pastoral temple. All we do know for sure is that they love and need each other and it’s very believable.

Not just Red’s girl, Mandy (Birdman’s Andrea Riseborough) is her own solitary creature. She works a register at a sleepy general store and reads pulp novels like Seeker of the Serpent’s Eye by a fictional author named Lenora Tor1  and illustrates chimeras in dreamy planetscapes. At night, bathed in moonlight or a television’s glow, she shares mundane opinions and alludes to childhood trauma. When Mandy is out walking by herself one day, she catches the eye of Jeremiah Sand, a self-styled guru who decides then and there that Mandy is to be his newest acolyte.

More Manson than messiah, Sand is a failed rock star who has found his next calling in religion, leading a group of stragglers who barely qualify as a cult. At their command is a horn that can summon demonic bikers, like extras from Hellraiser, to do Sand’s bidding and terrorize Red and Mandy. In a movie where Nic Cage forges a real-deal battle axe to slay some leather daddies, actor Linus Roache steals the show as the despicable embodiment of mundane evil. Nothing in Mandy is as distressing as a naked Jeremiah Sand forcing a drugged and captive Mandy to listen to his pathetic folk ballad and his even more pathetic monologue.

As Sand talks on and on about “his wants, his needs, his pleasures,” his face is superimposed over Mandy’s and they switch back and forth, back and forth, a visual struggle symbolizing a bigger face-off between a mediocre middle-aged dude and a young woman who knows her own power. Mandy doesn’t scream or fall under Sand’s sway—she does the unforgivable.

She laughs at him.

There was no way Mandy was getting out of this movie alive after that (this isn’t a huge spoiler), but she goes out having destroyed Jeremiah’s manhood in a way that makes Red’s own vengeance nearly perfunctory. Horror, tragedy, and much manly screaming follows, but none of that stayed with me as much as Mandy’s lack of a scream.

We’ve all seen that fridged-girlfriend movie countless times before. We haven’t seen many movies like Mandy.

Cosmatos divides his film into multiple chapters, with their own title cards, done up in Lisa Frank sparkle, perfect for a vintage band t-shirt. We don’t even see the actual title of the movie until an hour into it. That’s when Mandy, the woman, unfortunately takes on a literal two-dimensional role as Red descends into the hell of grief. Previously muted, Red reshapes the nightmarish world into a reflection of his namesake and Nic Cage reaches peak Nic Cage, bug-eyed and blood-soaked. Worth pointing out is that, as gory as the movie is, there is no depiction of rape and none of the violence towards women is gratuitous in that all-too-familiar grimy grindhouse way. LSD-freaks, however, get the full brunt of Red’s wrath. In this surreal reality, the beauty of the forest retreats and in its place are ominous mountains, sacred daggers, pyramids, ATV’s straight out of Mad Max, and a freaking tiger. Hell looks an awful lot like a painting you’d see airbrushed on the side of a van. Red is Orpheus, or he is insane, or the whole landscape was created by Mandy’s illustrations come alive. There’s room for a lot of fan theories.

Mandy keeps dosing the audience with enough lens flares, skewed perspectives, and color to make the viewer question if they, too, might’ve accidentally ingested some illicit substances. After what happens to Mandy, you’ll feel for Red even as you guffaw at the outrageousness of Nic Cage on a murder-bender. Released in theaters and on VOD, my recommendation would be to see Mandy with as big a crowd as possible, to communally enjoy the madness and nervous giggling and really feel immersed in the foreboding soundscapes of the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s final score.

Whether you’re part of the crowd that wants a thoughtful, twisted, journey into loss or the simple joy of an over-the-top Nic Cage slicing baddies in half to headbanger music, Mandy is a real cult-worthy crowd-pleaser.

Theresa DeLucci is having Cheddar Goblin mac n’ cheese for dinner tonight. A regular contributor to Tor.com covering TV and horror fiction, she’s also gotten enthusiastic about pop culture for Wired.com’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, and Den of Geek. Follow her on Twitter.

[1]My theory is that Lenora Tor is clearly an homage to artist and fantasy author Leonora Carrington and, well, Tor.com, obviously. We're flattered.

About the Author

Theresa DeLucci

Author

Theresa DeLucci is having Cheddar Goblin mac n’ cheese for dinner tonight. A regular contributor to Tor.com covering TV and horror fiction, she’s also gotten enthusiastic about pop culture for Wired.com’s Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast, and Den of Geek. Follow her on Twitter.
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6 years ago

I might have to check this out. I think I watched Beyond the Black Rainbow on Netflix several years ago and wasn’t terribly impressed, but if this film is a little more coherent with the same surreal visuals it might be a lot of fun.

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6 years ago

So I expected this movie to be a lot more gonzo than it is.

The problem is the final act.  He takes down the four “horsemen” before heading after the cult. The cult seems so much more weaker and incompetent in comparison.  The final kills come across as more pathetic than cathartic.

Maybe that is what the director was trying to do with the final act.  But the descent-into-hell imagery everywhere suggested otherwise.

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Derek C. F. Pegritz
6 years ago

Tor’s Horror imprint was hugely popular in the ’80s, and published tonnes of schlocky, pulpy books by the likes of Graham Masterton and Ramsey Campbell (both of whom are still alive and well and crankin’ out new tomes on the daily!), as well as total unknowns. The fonts used in Mandy are taken straight from Tor Horror paperbacks of the era (and other paperback horror mills like Zebra and Leisure Books), and many of the shots in the film–as well as the poster–could easily have been a Tor Horror cover.

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Mr. Vathek
6 years ago

SPECTACULAR movie, great overview… Let the new day dawn! 

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6 years ago

Is Paperbacks from Hell better than Horrostor? Because I loathed Horrorstor. Worth buying for the retail chain world satire, which is spot on, and the IKEA jabs, but TERRIBLE otherwise.

 

ETA: Though Horrorstor gets enough right that it cold be a killer movie or miniserial.

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6 years ago

“Outrageousness” is exactly why one loves Nic Cage.

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Jens
6 years ago

I’ve watched the movie ten days ago, it was the opening movie at the German Fantasy Filmfest.

I think it was the worst film I’ve ever seen in a theater.

Mostly style over substance; unfortunately the style didn’t appeal to me. Not much substance to speak of. Some overlong rambling monologues that hardly made any sense, scenes that didn’t make any sense whatsoever, much of what is identifiable as plot was unbelievable.

Judging from the other viewers’ reactions many (most?) were equally disappointed.

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joachim
6 years ago

Theresa DeLucci : “Mandy, is a giant, nightmarish middle finger to the misguided hippie years” etc.. 
I don’t know if that is the case, as everything in that movie is funnily twisted and gives different levels of understanding. It’s not possible to say that the hippie years were only misguided and throw everything away like this, all hippies stuff related are only failed ideology ¿? seriously…come one, that’s ridiculous to sum things this way. And “pure heavy metal” as the “antidote”(let’s sum it all under the satanism flag) is just almost a ridiculous joke nowadays! another reversed church most of the times with a poor level of theological understanding and low level magic practices. There are other worlds ! This movie is full of clichés and good fun for hype metal fans that likes red and blood and enjoy watching christian churches burning, but this is just another typical pathological reaction to christianity and some hippie bullshit – one can understand that easily though as you can always find creeps everywhere. But to me the movie failed to bring things on a whole another level, and rather quite beautifully painting a movie where “darkness” is everywhere and nothing else. This is visual pleasure without food for thoughts.. Yawn 

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Ken Ammi
6 years ago

I am attempting to understand one point, are you saying that if the movie portrayed, for example, a mosque burning then that would be “good fun for hype metal fans”? In any case, one of the inconsistencies in the movie is that the cult is referred to as “Jesus freaks” when they are actually obviously not Christians.

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