Mandy, You Gave Without Taking

Mandy is a surrealist horror film featuring Nick Cage going next-level rage cage on some religious nutters out in the woods. There's even a chainsaw fight. By all rights I should love this movie.

While I did enjoy the sheer weirdness, the action and most especially Cage's unhinged performance, overall I found Mandy a very frustrating film.

I love movies that have something to say and this movie sure feels like it's trying to say something. The trouble it it seems intentionally made to keep you from figuring out what that something might be. The so-called Jesus freaks are so big into hallucinogenics that the film itself starts really tripping balls about halfway through.

This is also where things go wrong, both for the characters and the story.

Warning: spoilers incoming.

It's at this point that the titular character, played by Andrea Riseborough, gets abducted by the cultists, dosed with LSD, stung by some weird bug and exposed to some shitty music while the cult leader exposes himself to her. She laughs in his face so of course he calls her a whore, hangs her up in a sack and burns her alive right in front of her boyfriend Red, played by Nick Cage.

This was where the film lost me. I knew this was a revenge story going in and this is exactly where I expected the story to go. But given the high praise this film received from critics and the truly creepy atmosphere director Panos Cosmatos had achieved I was hoping for more. Mandy may be the name of the movie, but her character has no agency and seems to exist only to get killed.

Don't get me wrong, this is an effective horror film. With a paltry budget of 6 million dollars Cosmatos made a better movie than most of the crap that Disney spends hundreds of millions producing. Riseborough performance is as haunting as Cage's performance is crazy. But underneath all the weird lighting, gore, psychedelic sexual and religious imagery, Mandy is just another woman in a fridge story that has been done to death.

For all the other ways this film is creative, to have the story hinge on such a tired trope is just disappointing.