Review of Mandy (2018) by K Nife C — 14 Sep 2018

Love it or hate it, the 80's aesthetic has seen a lot of mileage over the last ten years or so. Resurrected by O.G. Michael Mann's Miami Vice reboot, taken to the extreme by Panos Cosmatos' feature debut Beyond the Black Rainbow, and hitting mainstream success with Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, the bi-lighting and synth heavy scores make a comforting ensemble for Millenials pining for a time they never really experienced or were too young to appreciate in any way but through copies of a copy. Audio cassettes and VHS tapes have become the analog for Generation X's flower power tie-dye and Volkswagen bus fetish, which just goes to show that these things do work in phases and waves.

While I don't get too worked up when I see things like Stranger Things buzzing, I will get incensed at the mention of a movie like Ready Player One because where the former is derivative at worst and homage at best, the latter is vacuous referential spectacle, explicitly reminding you of cultural icons you would be better served watching instead. It's onanistic and lazy, and I'm certain much of the 80's fatigue I read and hear about is due to this particular brand of cultural regurgitation. It's either that, or these folks just don't like looking at the far ends of the color spectrum while a Roland Jupiter 8 saw wave warbles over a TR-808 beat. Stylistic decisions and ambiance can make or break a film, or it can send a reviewer into fits screaming, "style over substance!" I'm sure that for most people watching Cosmatos' latest opus, Mandy will bear the cross of 80's fatigue on its shoulders, but I will not deny its majesty when called upon to critique it.

This movie was made for me and people like me. It's one of the most psychedelic films I've ever seen. It is a mirror of mood in that it will reflect whatever attitude you bring to it. It's hilarious, sad, meditative, dark, gleeful, and weird in such an audacious way we don't often see in film anymore. It will often be said in conversations with my friends about older films, "this movie would never get made today" because it's so out there in concept, it's not marketable, it's anathema to mainstream filmmaking, etc. Mandy is one of those movies that somehow crawled out of the depths of movie hell to bring us a murderous hippie biker cult brainwashing people with LSD so that Nic Cage can get in a chainsaw fight with a redneck on a mountain. There's more badass in 1/4 of this film than in the last 10 Dwight Johnson films, and there's more audio-visual candy here than I've seen since Noe's Enter the Void.

So I get when someone is tired of an aesthetic, but I would hope that one can tell when it is being used as an act of cinematic love and when it is just there to be trendy.