Nicolas Cage appears in Mandy by Panos Cosmatos, an official selection of the Midnight program at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. NZH 14Jul18 -
Nicolas Cage appears in Mandy by Panos Cosmatos, an official selection of the Midnight program at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute. NZH 14Jul18 -
If a bloodsoaked, phantasmagorical acid-nightmare inspired by heavy metal album covers and featuring a primal, chainsaw-wielding Nicolas Cage sounds like your kind of crazy, then Mandy is the film for you.
It's likely to inspire fervent adoration and outright disdain in equal measure. Telling the story of a furious lumberjackon a quest for revenge against a cult of religious fanatics, the film is awash in garish neon colours and thrums along to an intense heavy-metal score.
The film is outright exhausting with the amount of arresting visuals that blare from the screen – and also because it is at least half an hour too long.
Visually Mandy is often transcendent, unleashing mind-bending, LSD-inspired sequences that are some of the most purely psychedelic you'll see on screen this year.
So it's unfortunate that this inspiration doesn't extend to the film's storyline, a testosterone-soaked and frequently reductive yarn that arguably wastes its best character, the titular Mandy, the coolest metal-chick you'll ever see, by reducing her to the object of desire of a bunch of screaming, angry dudes.
For a film of such audacious visuals and moments of high-wire insanity, it's unfortunate there wasn't as much care put into telling a richer story.
And then, of course, there's Nicolas Cage, Mandy's not-so-secret weapon. The man who never turns down an opportunity to be a total madman, Cage is totally bonkers here in the best possible way – a psychologically imbalanced anchor in a cosmically nightmarish world.
Starring: Nicholas Cage, Andrea Riseborough Director: Panos Cosmatos Running time: 121 minutes Rating: R18 (Violence, offensive language, drug use, sex scenes and content that may disturb) Verdict: Pretty, metal.
