London Film Festival 2018: First Look Review – Mandy

When his beloved wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is murdered in front of him by a gang of ‘Jesus freak’ bikers on industrial strength LSD, Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) goes on a rage, booze and drug fuelled rampage of bloody revenge.

Just look at that summary. How cool does that sound? I should love this. I should be shouting from the rooftops that it’s a hallucinatory new exploitation classic that can stand with the best of the recent tributes to the excesses of 80s horror and fantasy cinema. I should be doing that. I wish I was doing that.

For its first hour Panos Cosmatos’ second film owes its clearest debts not to exploitation classics but to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives. Like that film, the opening half of Mandy often seems to exist in slow motion, as if the characters were trying to move through an atmosphere made entirely of treacle. Every action, every pause, is drawn out to the very edge of tedium. Once the gang arrives on the scene (the one thing that happens commendably quickly), Cosmatos plunges us into a colour soaked world; all neon pinks and blues and deep reds (natch). This and the various effects he applies to give us a sense of the trip that the gang and its messianic leader (Linus Roache) are on do throw up some cool imagery, notably when we see Riseborough and Roache’s faces superimposed over each other as he tries to draw her in.

The imagery becomes even more impressive in the faster moving, and consequently better, second half of the film. Red crafts himself an iconic weapon – an awesome looking axe – which he wields in a series of attacks on the biker gang that are, in and of themselves, splattery fun. Best by far is a chainsaw fight, because it’s clearly practical, extravagantly bloody and, frankly, because no movie with a chainsaw fight is likely to have a sequence better than that. The other standout moment comes right at the start of the second half, as Red finally processes what has happened, downs most of a bottle of vodka, and lets out all his primal emotion. It’s unhinged, but some of the best acting Nicolas Cage has done in years. He’s simply silly in a lot of this film, but that’s an honest, raw, moment.

The problem is, that brief moment aside, I didn’t feel anything while watching Mandy. The relationship between Cage and Riseborough (besides looking odd thanks to the very apparent 18 year age gap) is only loosely established in the film’s early sequences, so it’s tough to put much emotional weight on it and Riseborough barely gets to say more than a few words, certainly not enough to establish her as any more of a character than ‘Red’s wife’. For me, the lack of emotional connection to many of the images or action undermines the very concept of a vengeance movie. Only one image in the film affected me on any deeper level than ‘that looks cool’: that of Red with his wife’s bones in his hands.

It’s tough to entirely dismiss Mandy. It looks fantastic. Cosmatos is clearly an accomplished and individual stylist and if he finds a narrative and characters that connect emotionally, He’s undoubtedly got a great film in him. Thanks to Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score the film also sounds extraordinary. I just wish it added up to more for me. I wish it weren’t wildly inconsistent, with such a marked contrast in quality as well as tone between its two halves and I wish it weren’t as absurdly self-indulgently overlong at a full two hours. I see what people are getting from this film, and I wish I could say I had the same experience, but for me Mandy may be the most disappointing film of LFF so far.

Mandy plays in LFF’s Cult programme on Thursday 11th, Friday 12th and Wednesday 17th of October