Review of Mandy (2018) by Richard D — 18 Sep 2018

Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough live a fairly idyllic life in a remote home in the woods, wearing heavy metal t shirts, reading fantasy novels and talking about comic books and stuff. Then the leader of a passing hippie, Jesus freak cult takes a shining to her and gets demonic, drug crazed bikers to kidnap her.

When things don't go his way, the leader burns her alive, setting Cage off on the path to brutal vengeance. This sounds like one kind of movie ... it's really not. If you've seen "Beyond the Black Rainbow", then you know Panos Cosmatos' style.

This film is like that film, only substitute a sci-fi/Cronenberg/day-glo/synth aesthetic with a drug-fuelled/idyllic/heavy metal/fantasy aesthetic and add a lot more violence. I liked this. There doesn't really seem to be any real point to it, but who says there always has to be a point? I admire how this film seems to be built out of the parts of other films .

.. "I Drink Your Blood" frequently came to mind ... but Cosmatos takes these pieces and builds his own thing out of them. If you think you'd like to see Nicolas Cage fight another guy with a chainsaw or see someone trip out because they were injected with the venom of a huge preserved wasp, this is for you.