Have you ever drifted to sleep on a couch, an open copy of Métal Hurlant on your lap, as your friends play Dungeons & Dragons and a Slayer record spins? If not, don’t worry, Panos Cosmatos will recreate this moment for you.
As with his first film – 2010’s slightly more Rush, Omni Magazine and early Cronenberg-inspired Beyond the Black Rainbow – Mandy is set in that most futuristic date, the year 1983. But this story is a little more steeped in demonic myth than microchips. After a slow credit sequence of a timber yard, set to King Crimson’s gorgeous song Starless (you don’t hear a Robert Fripp guitar solo in films too often) we meet Red (Nicolas Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). They are in a love haze in their strange woodland cabin beneath lava-coloured skies. They debate which is their favourite planet (she makes a good case for Jupiter), we see her sketching and reading fantasy novels in an early Mötley Crüe T-shirt. (That’s key, because before they were a hair band, they had more than a whiff of Satan to them.)
Then: trouble. A biker gang (or are they hippies?) with a messiah-complex leader (Linus Roache) soaked in hallucinogens spies Mandy and “must have her”. His Hellraiser-esque minions capture her and, when she does not submit to his advances (indeed laughs at his manhood), she is set on fire while Red, tied in barbed wire, is forced to watch. Though left for dead, Red frees himself and seeks his vengeance.
If there was more to the plot I’d tell you, I swear, but this one is really more about the mood and, eventually, the action. The first hour of the film is slow and, dare I say, trippy. Then the second half proudly stomps into “I can’t believe I’m what I’m seeing” territory.
It’s a mixed blessing having Cage in the lead. He’s certainly someone who can smelt a weird-looking axe, charmingly spit bon mots at hellions and get a cheer when he snorts an enormous amount of cocaine off a glass shard. But there are moments in which he gets an inadvertent laugh. This isn’t to suggest Cosmatos and co-writer Aaron Stewart-Ahn’s screenplay doesn’t have humour – it has the most memorable macaroni cheese television commercial in all of cinema – but a lengthy freakout scene in a bathroom (with Cage in tighty-whities and a shirt with a tiger on it) is destined for meme-hood, even though I think it wants to be taken seriously.
But this is criticising the response and not the text itself, which, while extremely simple, exudes craft at every turn. The late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s synthesiser-heavy score and Benjamin Loeb’s colour-saturated cinematography delivers the promise of every great painted 1980s VHS box cover. Tricky effects, like a drugged-out sequence shot with a CRT monitor’s gloss, the slowed-down voices as Red achieves his final form and a sublime use of fonts (and a main title card that doesn’t appear until one hour in!) are pure catnip for fetishists of this milieu.
Either you are one of the devoted or you’re not. You won’t know what camp you’re in until you see it.