Mandy Review (Film, 2018)

content warning: flashing lights*, violence against women, gore, nudity, sexual assault (implied), pornography (background on TV)

*I am sensitive to certain patterns of strobing and flashing lights. They give me migraines if they hit certain shades of yellow/green tones or have high contrast values. I had to walk away from Mandy multiple times as a neon green strobe was used to signify items from the abyss. There’s also a (forgive me) TikTok-logo looking trailing effect used to signify the use of certain drugs in the film that is also quite disorienting. People with photo-sensitivity issues should be cautious when approaching the film.

Mandy is a lot. This is a horror/sci-fi/revenge film defined by excess on every level. It is something wholly unique in the world of modern cinema.

Let’s be clear here. My interest in media criticism comes from a love of the genre film, specifically the b-movie. I grew very tired of seeing critical discourse dismiss the work I was drawn to as being without merit simply because they were horror, sci-fi, or fantasy stories that didn’t apologize for being horror, sci-fi, or fantasy. Maybe one or two a year in each medium could be held up as a token of “see, we don’t hate them,” but they were praised in spite of being genre. My goal in my writing is to give any piece of entertainment media a fair critical exploration regardless of its genre or origin.

One of the most encouraging trends in the entertainment industry is seeing how much more open academic and print criticism is to giving genre films a fairer shot. Many are still dismissed for not doing enough to be different, but more than ever are being acknowledged as good films. Mandy received rave reviews and many awards when it was released to the festival circuit in 2018. I suck at predicting which films will break through the critical bias. If a horror/sci-fi/revenge film as extravagant as Mandy can cut through the noise, we’re not far away from finally shaking off the bias against genre films.

We’re playing with house money with Mandy when it comes to horror elements. The film includes an evil cult worshiping beings from another plane and going mad, a revenge film about a person fighting for justice for a loved one, and a survival horror film about a woman abducted by a drug-addled cult. These are all terrifying concepts. It’s a lot to throw in one film, for sure, but Panos Cosmatos is not afraid of taking risks and digging deep.

Mandy is Cosmatos’ second film after the wonderfully bizarre Beyond the Black Rainbow. He’s a studied horror/sci-fi director. The nods to Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, Ridley Scott, and Brian De Palma (among many others) are clear but never a distraction. They’re not a substitution for substance, either; Cosmatos borrows from the best to create his own psychedelic blend of genre tropes.

I believe the polite term for a film like Mandy is “stylized.” The acting, the set design, the score, and the lighting are all excess. This is a film starring Nicolas Cage where Nicolas Cage’s acting is naturalistic by comparison to the rest of the cast. Cosmatos wants big swings to fully setup the otherworldly nature of his story. There is no room to breathe, relax, or adjust to the world because the world is not meant to be our own.

There is another trend growing in horror and science fiction cinema right now that I am on board with. Directors who grew up with b-movies on home video are now taking the helm of passion projects. The language of those films--with the blasts of red, pink, yellow, and blue theatrical gels, lingering close-ups of first time actors doing the absolute most, and a moral compass pointed towards justice above all else—is being elevated with rapid advances in technology. The first wave of films playing with this toolbox were dismissed as lesser upon release; many are now studied as influential or even classic films. The style, the tone, the editing, the acting, and the violence are all part of the cinematic canon. Directors like Cosmatos are being rewarded with glowing reviews and awards for the kind of film that wouldn’t even merit anything beyond a mention in the “Now Playing” ad for the local movie theater 40 years ago.

Does this mean that horror and sci-fi films are starting to look the same? Absolutely not. We’re getting more variety than ever. Even revenge films are going in widely different directions. Mandy is different than Revenge, which is different than The Nightingale, which is different than Ma, which is different than Unfriended. The list goes on.

The revenge film is a tricky genre to get right. The subject matter is upsetting by design. The revenge has to be worth it. We’ve not yet gotten to the point that sexual assault isn’t the most common impetus of the genre, but it’s starting to shift. These films used to be pure exploitation, showing the crime in excruciating detail, arguably glorifying a brutal and dehumanizing crime for cheap thrills. These films tend to be more subtle now, though there are exceptions. I strongly recommend doing your own research into the plot if you feel it might be unsafe for you to watch any revenge story. Mandy, for example, does not use assault as the driving force for revenge, but still uses the implication of sexual assault as character development for the villains of the film.

I digress. The genre has evolved enough that the focus of these films is character, not sensationalism. The victim is allowed to be a person beyond the crime committed against them. They get to choose to take revenge for their own sense of justice, not purely so the audience feels cathartic relief from the horrifying crime they chose to witness by seeing the film. The films are also not trapped to slavish realism because the audience knows what to look for in these stories.

The result is films like Mandy. 40 years ago, a revenge film could not play with all the colors of the rainbow like Mandy does. Cosmatos gets to build on a long cinematic legacy to show off his own unique vision for otherworldly terror. The mixing of colors and shifts in depth of field explored in Beyond the Black Rainbow feel like a natural extension of the world of Mandy. This is a story where creatures from an alternate, abyssal dimension are real and can be called on to do human bidding with essentially a phone call and access to human vices. Of course the rules of light and space don’t apply. The world is not normal because it is no longer just our world.

Mandy is an experience. It’s hard to describe as good or bad as there’s nothing else quite like it. Cosmatos has a vision as a director and he’s not afraid to commit to it.

Mandy is currently streaming on Shudder.

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