2010's Catch-Up: Mandy

From the moment I turned on Mandy, I was utterly transfixed by the hypnotic, haunting psychadelic horror of its world. So few filmmakers are actually able to truly capture what makes surrealist filmmakers like David Lynch so special without either seeming like a soulless knock-off or a pretentious wannabe, but Panos Cosmatos probably comes the closest that I've yet seen to capturing the dark, meditative hellscape of something like Lost Highway.

Part of what makes it work so well is that for as much as Cosmatos channels Lynch in his slow, static shots, hypnotic, psychadelic imagery and surreal, uncanny dialogue and characterization, Mandy is still very much a film with its own separate identity. As much as it takes from Lynch's Lost Highway, it also takes from the twisted abberations of Clive Barker's Hellraiser and the gruesome exploitation of the early work of Wes Craven.

Mandy is a film that takes place in a world that seems very similar to our own - the protagonist, Red, and his wife, Mandy, live in an idyllic cabin in the woods, where they live in seclusion when they're not at work. In the beginning, Red is driving his truck home from his job and turns off a radio playing a political speech that sounds directly out of our own culture. It's a familiar place - but it's as twisted and hellish as any of the worst haunts that the horror genre has to offer. What Cosmatos most inherits from Lynch isn't the visual style or dialogue, but the seemingly effortless ability to expose the darkest parts of our world for the places of true horror that they are. On his quest for revenge, Red crawls through buildings that may seem familiar from other types of media; gang hangouts, drug manufacturing facilities, abandoned churches, etc. With Cosmatos' assured direction, each and every one of these places is a portal to hell, through which the criminals that lurk there become some of the most sinister demons imaginable - and just by being around them, it seems, Red is dragged down to their level, forced to fight their horrific violence with his own.

The actual plot of Mandy is almost shockingly barebones, and it's something we've seen in horror and thriller films time and time again; Red and his wife Mandy are in love. A villain and his evil gang kill Mandy in front of him, and Red, a man who seems to have some violence in his past, goes on the offensive, engaging in a viciously bloody and incredibly violent spree of revenge killings that won't stop until either he dies or removes every trace of that gang from the world. This sort of macho revenge power fantasy isn't something that I tend to usually enjoy, especially since it typically carries some very weighted implications about the submissive nature of women in our society. Mandy isn't immune to these criticisms, certainly, but it presents these cliches better than I could possibly expect in the year 2018.

The key to Mandy's brilliance isn't in its plot at all, but rather in the world, the atmosphere, the presentation; the whole audiovisual landscape it plunges the viewer into. There's an almost biblical nature to the ordeal, but it's twisted, like an inverted cross set aflame. We follow Red through the deepest pits of hell on his journey, and by the time he emerges on the other side, his soul is not unscathed. At the end, he's as frightening to behold as his enemies, emanating a "cosmic darkness" as one character observes, taking just as much pleasure in the hunting and killing as the ones he came for.

That's not to say there's any deep or profound message on violence in this film - nothing that hasn't been said a hundred times over, anyway. Again, it's not really that deep of a story. It's just such an immersive, hypnotic, surreal and frightening experience - but one that's also endlessly fun. Somehow, it manages to take a film with the sensibilities of an arthouse horror and inject b-movie camp and gruesome exploitation and make the balancing act nearly perfect.

The key to this balance is in the acting - namely, the brilliant performance from lead actor Nicholas Cage himself. Cage's performance as Red is the central piece to the puzzle that is Mandy, and the biggest reason why it's become such a cult classic (that and everything else about it). Cage has a reputation for overacting, taking scenes where he's supposed to be somewhat intense and coming off completely unhinged and frighteningly deranged. It's funny in other movies, but here it's unnerving, surreal, frightening even at times... yet still just a little bit campy in all of the best ways. This really helps to sell the film's more gleeful moments, such as the chainsaw fight scene towards the end, the striking shot of an axe being buried in a villain's forehead moments before, or the scene in which Red lights his cigarette from the fire of a burning corpse.

Mandy is the rare cult horror flick that both revels in its exploitative, b-movie substance but also completely transcends it, doing the seemingly impossible and creating a campy, shallow splatter romp with all of the best and most insightful elements of an art film. The violence is gory and over the top, yet the images surrounding them are truly haunting. It takes equal inspiration from biblical imagery as it does psychedelic drugs. It's saturated with an intense, heavy metal soundtrack, yet one that feels less like the stereotypical b-movie thrash soundtrack and far more like the despairing depths of a blackened doom metal opus. Somehow, Mandy smooths the creases between all of these seeming contradictions to create one beautiful unified whole. It's a fascinating, haunting and endlessly entertaining work that I'll be thinking about for a long time to come, and I look forward to my inevitable re-watch.

See my 2010's Catch-Up Scorecard here!