Let’s do a quick recap of why I do this. I was always a big fan of the movies, and watching them was always something we did as a family when I was younger. In fact, I immediately transitioned my love for films right into working at a Video Store the minute I could get that job. Not sure I mentioned this prior, but my first video store job was at Palmer Video, and the uniform was a tuxedo. And would you believe I wore that for about two weeks until it changed over to West Coast Video. The uniform became a black polo shirt, and thank you to the new district manager, Joey Margo. Why do I remember this? I have no idea. Probably because the bowtie and cummerbund was no longer required. Thank god. I should also mention that we were located in New Jersey, so pretty far from the West Coast. But back to the why. I was able to rent movies every night, up to three at a time. And I did that every night. I am also not much of a sleeper, so cranking through 6 hours of films at night was not a problem. I actually had a pair of wireless headphones that were connected to my TV, so I could watch at night and not wake up the rest of the house. Okay, I am blabbing, but the point I am trying to make is that I have seen a ton of flicks. And because of that, I also feel like I have seen a ton of stuff that a lot of people have slept on. And that brings me to this series. Wait, Have You Not seen this? It stemmed from a few conversations with Larry and Mark about films that I was shocked they had not seen. Like, how did this fall through the cracks in their watching habits? Sometimes it just does. Well, I have also had the privilege of being a part of watching Walker blast through tons of films and also progress in his own film journeys. And because of that, I feel obligated to continue writing these for the next generation. Which brings me to this flick. Nick Cage in Mandy. At the request of Walker and his film buddies at Chapman. This is an easy one, because this is one of the few flicks I still have on Blu-ray and have easily watched a hundred times. Well, let’s get into this one.
Here is what is happening on the surface. It is 1983 in the Shadow Mountains. I think that is California, anyway. Red Miller, played by Nicolas Cage, is a lumberjack. He lives in a small cabin in the woods with his girlfriend, Mandy Bloom, played by Andrea Riseborough. Mandy reads fantasy paperbacks and paints strange pictures. Red really loves her, and you can tell by the scenes they share together. It is a genuinely beautiful opening that takes its time establishing something worth destroying. And then a cult leader named Jeremiah Sand, played by Linus Roache, sees Mandy from the window of his van while his followers are driving through the mountains. He wants her. He summons a group of demonic biker creatures called the Black Skulls through some kind of dark ritual involving a supernatural horn and a drug called Black Nectar. They take Mandy. And what Jeremiah does to Mandy in front of Red, and what happens to Mandy as a result, is the impetus of the entire second half of the film. I will not tell you exactly what it is. I will tell you that the film does not look away, and neither will you. And then Red is left alone and broken, and the second half of the film is his descent into something that stops being revenge and starts being something more like settling an account. He forges a weapon. He goes into the dark. And what follows is one of the most visually extraordinary and emotionally unhinged things ever committed to film. And that is where I will leave you. This flick is bonkers in the perfect way. But let’s talk about the main reason why this flick rocks.
The cast, but let’s start with the star. Nicolas Cage is Red Miller, and I want to say something very specific about this performance because it is important to understand what is happening here. I have written about Cage before. In 8MM, he was playing the straight man, the normal decent person being eroded by what he witnesses, and I talked about how restrained and almost wholesome that performance was. This is the opposite of that. This is Cage operating in a completely different universe where the restraint of the first half, the quiet niceness with which he holds Mandy’s hand and talks about the stars, only exists specifically so that when it cracks, it cracks the whole dam.. And when he cracks, it is one of the most committed and genuinely unhinged performances he has ever given. The bathroom scene, which is just Cage alone in his underwear drinking an entire bottle of liquor and screaming at the walls, I believe, is not acting. He is losing his mind on screen. And then once he gets through that scene into the second half of the film, he becomes something that does not have a name exactly. Let me try to quantify it. He becomes part Charles Bronson, part heavy metal album cover, part ancient mythology. He forges a weapon. He lights a cigarette off a burning severed head. He fights another man with a chainsaw in a quarry. And he does all of it with a kind of terrible joy that only Nicolas Cage can manufacture. People talk about Cage being unhinged as if it is a liability. In this film, it is the entire point. This is easily his best performance ever. And I have seen them all. I looked over this filmography, and I am at plus sixty of his films. And like I said earlier, this is his best, but Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans, he is amazing. Of course, Face/off and ConAir are classics. I love the remake of Gone in 60 Seconds. Obviously, The Wicker Man. The Bees!!!. And I think he was super solid as Ghost Rider. And Drive Angry. Oh man, I can honestly list everything he was in. And I am not even mentioning Raising Arizona, Wild at Heart, and Leaving Las Vegas. Nick Cage. Man. Anyway, Cosmatos built a place specifically for what Cage does when he is fully unleashed, and the result is one of the most purely Cage things that has ever existed on a screen. I do not know who else could have made this work. I genuinely do not.
Now the rest of the cast, because this film is genuinely loaded. Andrea Riseborough is Mandy Bloom, and as I said earlier, what she does with the little time she is on screen is extraordinary. You know her from Birdman, from Oblivion with Tom Cruise, from The Death of Stalin, from Possessor (Cronenberg’s son), and most recently from To Leslie in 2023, which got her an Oscar nomination out of essentially nowhere. She is super eye-catching, and you can see in the film why Jeremiah Sand cannot look away from her. Linus Roache is Jeremiah Sand, and this is one of the great villain performances of the last decade. Honestly, it is awesome. You know him as District Attorney Michael Cutter from his long run on Law and Order, as Thomas Wayne in Batman Begins, as King Ecbert in Vikings, and as Robert F. Kennedy in the miniseries Kennedy. He is a classical stage-trained actor, and what he does with Sand is brilliant, a failed folk musician who decided God chose him rather than accept that he just wasn’t any good. There is a scene where he plays Mandy one of his songs, and she laughs at him and the way Roache’s face moves in that single moment is some of the finest acting in the film. Honestly, a scene I have watched fifty times, easy. Richard Brake plays the Chemist, a figure who exists in the movie, but not sure he is real, and his single scene is one of the most unsettling things in a film absolutely full of unsettling things. I mean, he is making acid, I am pretty sure, with his bare hands, and then he licks his fingers. Insanity or not human, one or the other. Brake has been in Rob Zombie’s Halloween films and 31, in Game of Thrones as the Night King, and in Doom and as Joe Chill in Batman Begins. I recently saw him in Sisu 2. Fun flick. The great William Henry Duke Jr. plays Caruthers, an old friend of Red’s. He gives him some info and a crossbow, and what more do you need? Oh, and you know him as the great Bill Duke. Duke directed A Rage in Harlem and Deep Cover, appeared as Mac in Predator alongside Schwarzenegger, and was in Commando as Cooke, Car Wash, and Menace II Society. He also directed Hoodlum, which is super underrated. Solid cast.
Now, the crew, and this is the part of this one that I want to talk a lot about. The director is Panos Cosmatos, and here is something you should know about him before anything else. His father is George P. Cosmatos, who directed Cobra, Tombstone, and Rambo: First Blood Part II. His first feature, Beyond the Black Rainbow, is a film that I have seen a million times, but it is not for everyone. Mandy is only his second feature film, and what he has made here is a film so insane and visually beautiful that it is difficult to process that a person who has directed once before made this. I read in one of his interviews that this film was made from the grief of losing both of his parents. His mother died first, and then his father died while he was developing the film. And you can tell he is dealing with something. This is not a film about revenge in the way that most revenge films are about revenge. I said revenge a lot there. I have seen John Wick and Death Wish, and even I Spit on Your Grave. This is different. This is essentially a film about what becomes of a person when the last good thing keeping them happy is gone. It honestly is like John Wick, only more insane. The screenplay was co-written by Cosmatos and Aaron Stewart-Ahn, who is a writer, but doesn’t have much to his name. The cinematographer is Benjamin Loeb, who joined the production only two weeks before filming began and knocked out some insane cinematic scenes. The colors that are on the screen at times are visually beautiful. The film was shot in Belgium, and it is hard to believe these places exist. The weapon that Red makes in the film, a giant double-headed battle axe, was based on the letter F from the logo of the metal band Celtic Frost ( something I just saw while I was doing research for this). And then there is the score, which is one of the most important things in this film. The music was composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson. I had to type this like 6 times. The composer who did Arrival, Sicario, The Theory of Everything, and Prisoners. Mandy was the last film he did before he died at the age of 48. Sadly, I don’t think he saw this released. The score is not one to miss.
My favorite part, the quotes.
“A psychotic drowns where the mystic swims. You’re drowning. I’m swimming.” – Red
“These arrows cut through the bone like a fat kid eats cake.” – Caruthers
“That was my favorite shirt!” – Red
“Cheddar Goblin. “ – Red
“I come for the Reaper.” – Red
Love that last line. Okay, look, this is a film that made 1.7 million dollars against a 6 million dollar budget, and that box office number is meaningless because this was never a film about making money. It won the Saturn Award for Best Independent Film. And by the end of 2018, it was on a ton of people’s top ten films of the year. It is Amazon Prime right now for $3, and that is a first. Normally, a rental is $4. Not a bad deal, but let’s preface that with this is not a film for everyone, and I am not going to pretend it is. It is long, and it is strange, and it is very dark and very loud and very red. But if you trust me, you will love it. Standard deal applies. You hate it, find me, and I have the singles. But I think I am keeping these.
- So I was doing a deep dive on this film after watching it and came across an interview where Richard Brake mentioned that in an early draft of the script, the caged Bengal tiger named Lizzie was originally written as a lizard. He said when he showed up on set, Panos pulled him aside and told him, completely matter-of-factly, that Lizzie was a tiger now, which honestly tells you everything you need to know about how this film was made. Yup, a Bengal tiger.
- The film begins with a title scroll displaying: “When I die Bury me deep, lay two speakers at my feet, put some headphones on my head, and rock and roll me when I’m dead”. This was the final statement of condemned man Douglas Roberts before he was executed by lethal injection in Texas in 2005. Man, I love everything about this film.
