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Director: Panos Cosmatos
Screenwriters: Panos Cosmatos, Aaron Stewart-Ahn

By Roderick Heath

Panos Cosmatos is a second-generation directing talent, son of the Florence-born, Greco-Italian director George Pan Cosmatos and Swedish sculptor Birgitta Ljungberg-Cosmatos. Cosmatos the Elder directed many a punchy action movie over the years, including Escape to Athena (1979), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1984), Leviathan (1989), Tombstone (1994), and my personal favourite, his blend of disaster movie and epidemic thriller, The Cassandra Crossing (1977). At his best George had the kind of headlong, take-no-prisoners energy to his filmmaking that makes for great trash cinema. Panos Cosmatos debuted in 2011 with the instant cult film Beyond the Black Rainbow, signalling that he was going to be a very different filmmaker to his father. Just two films into his career, Cosmatos the Younger has confirmed a style based in delirious visuals and an allusively creative approach blended with concerted fetishisation of genre plots and imagery, a schismatic aesthetic Panos had stated very plainly is based in a desire to unify the artistic styles of his parents, George’s popular, spectacular thrillers and Birgitta’s abstract conjurations. Mandy, his second film, reaped a lot of excitement in the build-up to its release by promising a hallucinogen-tinted, utterly madcap revenge thriller carefully pitched to give fans of star Nicholas Cage a pure, uncut dose of his weird and galvanising talent.

For once hype was inescapably correct, but Mandy proves something even more eccentric, a plunge into an evocation of a netherworld at once dreamy and charged with hellraising headfucking, but also a considered attempt to portray extreme woe as a state of mind that remakes the universe in its own sorry image. Mandy unfolds in a version of 1983 that might as well be in an alternate dimension, the landmarks all the same but the general spirit and rules of reality all revised by cosmic fiat. Red (Cage) and his partner Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) live in a house in the Shadow Mountains of British Columbia. Red works as a lumberjack, hewing away at the fringes of the primal forest, whilst Mandy mans the counter at a gas station and store, whiling away her hours reading paperback fantasy novels and painting fanciful illustrations for what seems to her own comic book take on her favourite genre. Red and Mandy both have the aspect of survivors, renegade lovers recovering from wild youths now happily drifting through the days out on the fringes of civilisation, with only need for each-other’s company when Red comes back from his logging adventures. Mandy, with her heavy metal T-shirts and goggle eyes, is a fawnish, fey-seeming lady who seems to operate purely by some skewed interior compass, whilst Red seems to have built his life around providing her with a safe shell to crawl into, partly because he needs her arms to crawl into himself.

One day, as Mandy walks up on the gravel roads bisecting the forest about their home, a van passes by, and she locks eyes with a man in the vehicle, one Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache). Sand is the guru and warlord of a wandering gang of bohemian rabble calling themselves Children of the New Dawn, all in his thrall as a self-appointed messianic voice, and he instantly decides he must possess Mandy. Once ensconced in a nearby motel, Sand angrily spurns his older disciple and concubine Mother Marlene (Olwen Fouéré) in favour of a younger, Sister Lucy (Line Pillet), whilst instructing his slavish aide Brother Swan (Ned Dennehy) to find Mandy and bring her into their midst. To help Swan, Sand gives him a device he calls the Horn of Abraxas, which Swan uses once he’s driven out into the woods; the horn proves to have the ability to conjure up the Black Skulls, a band of demons riding motorcycles, whose hellish ranks Swan impresses for the task of taking Mandy and Red captive in their home. In exchange for their services, Sand casually tells Swan to let the demons have another of the disciples as blood sacrifice. The demons and cultists break into Red and Mandy’s house in the night, separating the lovers, tying Red up, and dragging off the hapless disciple for slaughter. Marlene and Lucy dose Mandy with a drug cocktail and subject her to the sting of a huge wasp just for flavour, before taking her to meet Sand in the living room, where the cult leader tries to dazzle her with his brilliance until she submits to his overlordship.

The opening scenes stake out the dominant mood and style as one of narcotised and amniotic immersion, a state of free-floating spirit that seems to mimic the womb-like remove of Mandy and Red’s life together. They’re the kind of couple who know each-other’s sense of humour backwards – Red’s punchline-lacking knock-knock joke cracks them both up – and who settle down for dinner whilst watching a trashy horror movie. Their house has mostly glass walls that allows them to all but float amongst the trees. Mandy has a pacific sensitivity about her that lends specially charged meaning to a moment like when she stumbles across the corpse of young deer, and steps naked out of a lake with fixated eyes that seem to hold Red enthralled by her irrational power, in the best possible way. The jagged hieroglyphic of a scar on her cheek testifies to some encounter with terror and pain in her past. Riseborough’s preternatural gaze has never been quite so well exploited in a role where she’s required less to seem like she’s acting – which of course can demand very difficult acting – than a spirit haunting the movie even when Mandy is still alive. Mandy’s talent for illustrating seems to mesh with her fondness for the fanciful, as she’s reading a high fantasy novel called Seeker of the Serpent’s Eye about a questing hero battling sorcerers and demons. After finding the deer’s corpse, she recounts to Red, in a long, slow, eerie vignette, the story of how her father encouraged her and some childhood friends to slay some starling chicks he found, through his hatred for the greedy birds, but Mandy, lacking that edge of sadism so many only need encouragement to indulge, ran away.

The arrival of Sand and his band offers a contrasting state of hermetic self-involvement, with Sand a tight-wound ball of craven wont mixed with a strange, livewire intensity that suggests a state of painfully ecstatic awareness. Sand wields some authentic-feeling qualities of the cult leader. Like Charles Manson he’s a failed musician, and explains with wide-eyed fervour about the transcendental experience of God speaking to him and telling him everything in the world was his, seemingly as a recompense for his dud career, and he offers a similar pleasure to those who follow him, a promise that even if he doesn’t want to use all the gifts of the people under his aegis all the time, he can still channel them towards a greater purpose than what the world usually extends to them. You’d dismiss him as a colossal wanker if he didn’t seem to really have some mystical powers, with his ability to completely compel his followers and summon demons to do his bidding. Whenever fear or anxiety unseat him, he’s able to draw in and recover a sure sense of his power, returning to glazed and fanatical stature.

The film’s focal sequence comes when the drugged-up and tethered Mandy is obliged to witness as Sand parts his robe so she can behold his scrawny body and flaccid penis and listen with edification to his psychedelic folk-rock, a scene pure black comedy fervour wrapped in a shiny glaze of trippy colouring and droning scoring that keeps in mind the menace underlying all, the assurance that Sand will readily and easily do terrible things to Mandy and Red. What he doesn’t expect, however, is Mandy’s reaction to his great performance, as she begins to laugh with fearsome contempt for the man and his music: Mandy has encountered and defeated such monstrosities before, if only on the plain of her dreams. Sand’s punishment for mockery is however dreadful: once his underlings tie Red to a tree in the yard, he has Mandy bundled up in a sack, hung up before him, and burned alive. Left to his own devices by the Children, who leave after reducing Mandy to ashes, Red manages to work his hands free from his bonds and goes into his house, still tauntingly the same as it was a few hours before but now utterly changed, absent the presence that gave it meaning. Red is transfixed by the spectacle of an ad for “Cheddar Goblins” on TV that has demonic visages rising from a bowl of snack food, beset by animated visions of Mandy as a zombie, and stung as he pours vodka on his raw wrists and slashed side, raw physical pain anchoring him to a reality he’d probably easily check out from otherwise.

Mandy’s bizarre style, sporting rich colour effects, plangent sound design, and general miasmic mood, sees expressive textures explicitly related to the otherworldly sensibility of the two tribes, the world of two that is Red and Mandy and the cobbled-together family that is the Children. Cosmatos seems bent on creating a modern version of psychedelic cinema, but that style’s generally gaudy, amped-up sensibility is swapped here for one liquidinous languor, as if David Lynch and Andrei Tarkovsky tried to collaborate on a New World movie for Roger Corman. The storyline proceeds with near-mythic simplicity, telling an essential story of loss and retribution, in order to describe the obsessive emotional quotient of Red’s experience after Mandy’s death. Mandy describes Panos’s imagined idea of 1983 as an age viewed through a prism of cultural detritus and childhood impressionism. The past is surely another country, populated with counterculture exiles and illustrated through the vivid, conceptually related but subtly diverse and individually totemic styles of cover art on Heavy Metal albums, drugstore paperbacks, VHS schlock, and comic book illustrations, all soaked in the bad Woodstock brown acid. The film might be a dream either Red or Mandy are having, the stuff of their waking fantasies churned together in the dye welling out of their subconscious.

The demarcated chapters are announced by titles written in retro fashion, mimicking the horny curlicues on ‘80s horror paperback covers or the glazed, glowing fonts of fantasy film logos in trailers, the sorts of stylistics that tend to be so ubiquitous that you don’t really notice when they go out of favour. Cosmatos seems to be recalling with happy barbarity the days when pop cultural schisms were potent demarcations, when furious arguments over things we tend to laugh at now like Satanic messages in rock music could echo through the news space with credulity. The joke of this is that a pair like Red and Mandy, who often sports a pentagram-emblazoned Motley Crue shirt, are harmless when left to their own devices, whilst the Children, who are in spite of their hellspawn helpmates are actually designated “Jesus freaks,” are the cruel and marauding imposers. Cosmatos shows Reagan on the TV as another brand of beatific cult leader. The sociological import of this, Cosmatos suggests, is that more real damage has been done to the modern mindset by those proposing to have a path to God and glory than those happy to roll around in affected devilishness. The mysterious treaty between Heaven and Hell proposed by Sand and the Black Skulls, echoes an idea out of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, where the obsessive Jesuit Naphta proposed Satan was much closer to God than Man because the Devil was playing his part in the scheme of things whilst Humanity is always trying to go off on its own path. You could even describe Red’s path in the second half of the film as the dramatization of that path.

Meanwhile Sand portrays a certain type of vanity to the hilt, turning his own libido and mesmeric conviction in his own value into a cosmic state, a diseased devolution of hippie mysticism into pure Me Decade ego service, bedecked in faux-religious finery. Mandy wins a kind of victory over him, signified as her face and his seem to be blurring and becoming one, doubtless the process by which he subsumes his slavish believers into his service, in an image reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). But Mandy instead rips free and begins to howl with laughter, the worst offence to the man-god, who desperately masturbates as if hoping it’s a rite that can ward off humiliation, before he casts Mandy into the fires where, as the Children gleefully tell Red, she’ll remain burning for eternity. After escaping his bonds Red tries to touch her scorched remains, only for her skull to crumble into dust. Cage, up until this point mostly a quiet and beholding figure becalmed by Mandy’s presence in his life, now squirms in terrible private pathos. In his tiger-emblazoned shirt and underpants, pale legs barely propping up his weary body and pouched genitals and finally giving out, he’s like a caricature of a very specific image of bereft and pathetic masculinity, and concludes with the sight of him weeping on the toilet.

Red sets out to avenge her with steady determination, visiting his enigmatic friend Caruthers (director and former Predator star Bill Duke in a splendid cameo), a calm but foreboding helpmate who has his ear to the ground, and who keeps a crossbow Red owns stashed away, a device of death Red calls The Reaper. Caruthers tells Red that he’s heard about the Children and their demon brethren, who tear along the remote roadways of the region transporting a powerful version of LSD concocted by some mad alchemist living out in the wilds, and reports rumours about the Black Skull’s nightmarish activities and supposed origin, as a biker gang perverted and misshapen by the alchemist feeding them a particularly obscene brew. Realising he needs a more than ordinary weapon to fight such monstrosities, Red returns home and forges a battle axe out of silver, moulding, hammering, and polishing the weapon until it’s a glistening demon slayer which he names, of course, Mandy. This sequence comes weighed up with brazenly iconic, fuck-yeah delight in the macho swagger and sense of impending reckonings, and Red sets out on his battle with evil well-armed if still facing great odds: “You’ll probably die,” Caruthers has warned him, to Red’s reply, in a tenor of slight hurt mixed with dry resolve, “Don’t be negative.”

When the time comes for the roaring rampage of revenge Mandy certainly delivers. But it remains steadfast in its strangeness, its air of surreal grappling with a specific keynote of emotion. It’s also a film dedicated utterly to describing a mood that, for all the retro trope harvesting, seems somehow purely contemporary. A feeling of being bound and trapped, flailing in impotent anxiety before the entitled arrogance of others, of being naked before looming arithmetic of debts that can be repaid fourfold and yet only ever be too late and too little. It’s close to a zeitgeist right now, and Cosmatos, however coincidentally, speaks to it. More immediately, his purpose is to define Red’s sense of dislocated grief, and that is also the idea of grief in general. Red goes to war with “all that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil,” as his ancestor Ahab once did. Mandy fixates on a rarely-contemplated aspect of the revenge saga, which usually, when not simply using it a pretext for violence, utilises it as a metaphor for the process of expiating loss. Mandy immerses Red, and the viewer, in a sodden state of inescapable awareness where the shock of violence intensifies rather than dispels the punch-drunk atmosphere, each gruesome slaying and sticky end ratcheting up the insanity a few more degrees. Every torn body and crumpled skull simply underscores the impossibility of escaping the sink of sorrow until the very last station is reached.

Like some of the other more interesting films of 2018, like Lynne Ramsay’s equally shell-shocked You Were Never Really Here and Steven Spielberg’s more larkish take Ready Player One, Mandy considers the universe conjured by the mind, infinitely transformative and replete with manifold masks and yet so often defined by certain, infinitely significant points of reference, giving shape to the fragmentary nature of existence. Perhaps it’s the last frontier, a place of authentic struggle as well as retreat. Early scenes of Red and Mandy out picnicking and swimming in the woods are given the faintly unreal lustre of how Mandy might paint such a scene, with surging vortexes of pure energy in the sky and walls of fire appearing to Red, whilst the film’s very last shot perceives a landscape transformed into an exoplanetary wasteland, with soaring crags and hovering galactic bodies. Mandy herself seems to exist in a liquid state of being, timeless and resistant to ossification, a state that Cosmatos identifies as specifically feminine, in a manner reminiscent of Ma Joad’s speech from The Grapes of Wrath (1940), whilst Red is defined by a reductive sense of the function of masculinity, in the sense that he’s only free of the need to hunt – to chase down and destroy – when immersed in her space, and to be bereft of that space as he is when Mandy dies is like being born in a cold world all over again, birth that is like death. That Red plucks out a bottle of spirits from where he’s kept it stashed for god knows how long and uses it balm wounds inside and out says a lot of how he doused and dimmed that need before meeting Mandy.

For a film that depends on exploiting Cage’s reputation as Hollywood’s most obliging fruitcake, his performance in Mandy is actually quite controlled, expertly managing the leap from dreaming companion to nihilistic marauder. When he pulls out some trademark mannerisms, like his mad grin, they come with a newly certain sense of import, of the soul in extremis, after passing through moments of convincing naturalism, as in Red’s despairing bathroom moment. Cage is willing to look undignified and slightly absurd here, in a way a lot of actors don’t dare. Mandy’s death is portrayed for the most part via Red’s agonised reaction. This scene presents a variation on another memorable recent Cage role, inverting the situation in Kick-Ass (2010) where he was the one burning whilst the female he cared for tried to save him. Red hits the warpath, hacking, slashing, goring, and felling his foes, who seem to become less substantial with each one he defeats, phantoms who are functions of his mourning. Even more so when the Black Skulls take him prisoner and pinion him with a nail through one hand and handcuffs on the other, perfectly encapsulating his agonistes. Red even taunts one of the demons into punching him repeatedly, although this has the practical purpose of loosening the pipe length he’s cuffed to, and when the pipe comes loose he clobbers the vile creature until it plunges into a gaping pit.

The Black Skulls’ abode, a mixture of torture chamber and drug house where garbage is piled up, startling elixirs waits in jars, and porn flicks buzz on the TV, cunningly blurs the line between presenting the Black Skulls as authentically paranormal figures and merely heightened, hallucination-transformed junkies; in their look, with their nail-bedecked clothes, blade-sporting limbs, and chitinously masked faces, they seem like a cross between the Cenobites from Hellraiser (1987), the gimp from Pulp Fiction (1994), and Brando-idolising bikers. Red slays all of the Black Skulls and moves on to track down the chemist (Richard Brake) who makes their dire drug concoctions: the chemist proves able to deduce purely by reading Red’s stoic facial expression what his thoughts are. The chemist releases his pet tiger – yes, pet tiger – on Red’s unstated insistence and guides him on to the remote church where the Children congregate, where he does battle with the cultists one by one, gruesomely shoving the end of his battle axe down Swan’s throat and duelling Brother Klopek (Clément Baronnet) in a contest with roaring chainsaws. Finally Red approaches the end of his journey in the church, built over a subterranean system of tunnels that look like they might have been built for a government installation, a labyrinth where Red must first move past the sensual pleasures Marlene offers before reaching Sand and his assurances that Red is a paltry thing compared to his exalted triumph. But Sand is reduced to an obviously fake waxen skull and limbs breaking and melting under the fire and wrath Red brings, a crumpled mannequin in death: perhaps that was only ever his function, to awaken the apocalyptic force in Red. He drives away from the burning church, seeing Mandy in the car seat beside him, perhaps her spirit rescued from perdition or just a wishful apparition in his overheated brain, but with the sure meaning that as far as Red’s concerned he’s done right by her.

Mandy comes on as an enveloping audio-visual experience, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s sonorous final score charting the tale’s psychological tenor and sense of spiritual angst, infusing Cosmatos’ lysergic images which roll on drenched in clashing primary hues that suggest Mario Bava making a music video. King Crimson plays over the opening credits. Recognisable fragments of the kind of late ‘70s and early ‘80s drive-in and video store fodder Cosmatos seems to have consumed and reprocessed into the fuel oil of his imagination float by: the chainsaw duel is out of Motel Hell (1981), the forging scene reminiscent of Conan the Barbarian (1982). The vision of Red overlooking the Children’s church, a spire of pyramidal wood in the midst of a deep, cleaving gorge, has a sense of outsized, cyclopean strangeness reminiscent of Michael Mann’s The Keep (1983) and some other, oddball by-products of the era. Often Cosmatos aims for self-conscious transformation of kitsch, like a vision of the released tiger roaring under a pulp mag moon, that obeys some personal logic, an attempt to transcribe the memory of what it was like to be a particularly imaginative adolescent, trying to imagine the perfect movie behind all those video cases, the one the real movies usually proved so disappointingly not to be.

Mandy could be the strangest and most interesting attempt to blend art house and grindhouse notions of cinema since Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001). The feeling of inevitability in its narrative could be called a fault, a limitation of its cumulative power. But it’s also certainly an offshoot of Cosmatos’ motive, his desire to dramatise a state of mind, to work through a fixation and exist entirely in an oneiric space. The Red who comes out the far end of his savage adventure is not the same man, but a new chimera, the product of his loss and love both. Mandy struggles to articulate the feeling of a particularly intense variety of dream or trip, and succeeds as such, but also emerges as the sort of movie doomed to split those who dare enter its colour-drenched frames into ranks of true believers and those who run the other way hard and fast. For myself, I both love it and distrust it, for the same reason as it tries to speak past the front of the mind to the weird and fetid recesses in the back. It is, in its way, the most intense and reorientating cinematic experience I’ve had since Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011), a film with which it shares little but the increasingly rare treat of directors utterly in love with their mediums determined to enact their vision to the limit.