Mandy (2018) | Plot, Cast & Horror Facts

Mandy is a 2018 psychedelic revenge horror film by Panos Cosmatos in which a lumberjack hunts the cult that murdered his partner.

At a Glance

Overview

In 1983, in the Shadow Mountains of the Pacific Northwest, lumberjack Red Miller lives in a lakeside cabin with Mandy Bloom, an artist who paints fantasy scenes and works days at a gas station. Their peace ends when Mandy catches the eye of Jeremiah Sand, a failed folk singer who now leads a hippie cult called the Children of the New Dawn. Jeremiah’s followers summon the Black Skulls, a gang of demonic bikers addicted to a tainted drug, to abduct her. When Mandy laughs at Jeremiah’s attempt at seduction, he has her burned alive in front of Red.

The film is split in two. Its first half is slow, dreamy and drenched in color, more mood piece than story. Its second half is a hallucinatory revenge odyssey in which Red forges a battle-axe, takes a crossbow from an old friend and works his way through bikers and cultists. Cosmatos’s woodland setting and its invasion by a monstrous outside force recall the isolation of The Thing, while Red’s relentless pursuit gives the film the grim momentum of a slasher turned inside out: like the stalker in Halloween, he simply will not stop, but this time the unstoppable figure is the wronged man.

Production

Cosmatos, the son of director George P. Cosmatos, made Mandy as his second feature after Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010). He wrote the screenplay with Aaron Stewart-Ahn, and the film was produced by SpectreVision, the company co-founded by Elijah Wood, with Umedia and XYZ Films as a Belgian-American co-production. Benjamin Loeb’s cinematography uses heavy color filters, lens flares and painterly lighting, and the film includes an animated sequence and fake commercials that suit its 1980s setting. Cosmatos has described drawing on fantasy paperback covers and on the imagined versions of movies he was too young to see. Jóhann Jóhannsson composed the score, one of his last, and the film is dedicated to his memory; he died in February 2018, seven months before the US release.

Cast

• Nicolas Cage as Red Miller
• Andrea Riseborough as Mandy Bloom
• Linus Roache as Jeremiah Sand
• Ned Dennehy as Brother Swan
• Olwen Fouéré as Mother Marlene
• Richard Brake as the Chemist
• Bill Duke as Caruthers

Reception

Mandy was a commercial disappointment, grossing about $1.8 million on a roughly $6 million budget, much of its audience having found it through a day-and-date release on demand. Critically it was a triumph. Rotten Tomatoes lists approximately 90 percent approval, and Metacritic shows a score of 83 out of 100 based on 30 critics, indicating universal acclaim. Reviewers praised Cage’s volcanic performance, Riseborough’s quiet intensity and Cosmatos’s visual imagination, while noting the deliberately slow first half. The film won Best Independent Film at the 45th Saturn Awards, and Loeb was nominated for Best Cinematography at the 34th Independent Spirit Awards. It is now widely considered a modern cult classic. Its reputation has only grown with time, cementing its place among the decade’s defining genre films.

Spoiler: The Ending

Red kills the Black Skulls in their den, then tracks down the Chemist, who supplies their drug, and wins a chainsaw duel with cultist Brother Klaus. He fights his way into the cult’s compound, kills Mother Marlene and Brother Swan, and finally finds Jeremiah in a chapel. Jeremiah begs for his life and offers himself to Red; Red crushes his head with his bare hands and burns the chapel. As he drives away, blood-soaked, he imagines Mandy in the passenger seat and smiles, and the landscape outside turns into the alien, painted world of her art. The film offers no return to the cabin’s calm; vengeance is complete, but the man who carried it out is lost inside it.

Trivia & Facts

• Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score was one of the last he completed, and the film is dedicated to him.
• Cosmatos’s previous feature was the cult science-fiction film Beyond the Black Rainbow.
• Elijah Wood is among the producers through his company SpectreVision.
• The film won the Saturn Award for Best Independent Film.
• Red’s chainsaw duel and his breakdown in a bathroom are its most widely discussed scenes.
• Richard Brake, who plays the Chemist, also played Dortlich in Hannibal Rising.