Mandy

What do you get when a delusional auteur decides to slap on a bunch of high-minded, “elevated horror” claptrap over a run of the mill dead-wife revenge movie, because they can’t bear the thought of having made the unbuttered white toast of movies? This worthless steaming pile. I think the best way to explain why this movie is so profoundly terrible is to compare it to another recent, weird Nic Cage movie, Color Out Of Space. I loved that movie. As of this writing, it is my reigning champ for horror movie of 2019. Color and Mandy have so much in common as far as elements within the movie, but nothing in common at all in terms of application or execution. Allow me to elaborate. Color’s use of vibrant, well, color, is given narrative purpose. It is as enchanting as it is dangerous. It is bringing life to the planet even as it brings death to the people and animals around it. Mandy just applies color filters over the movie because WHOA TRIPPY MAN. Why are scenes lit with one color or another? No reason, it just is. It’s pointless and distracting, and most of all, unearned. Color’s use of hallucinatory and surreal scenes are, again, narratively justified. As the otherworldly essence poisons the earth around it, the human minds are incapable of grasping it, and that is reflected in the film. Beauty and horror intertwine. Mandy has nothing behind it. No allegory, no metaphor, no greater truth to uncover, and certainly no simple narrative purpose to its shotgun barrage of surrealism. It does not seek to put you in the headspace of the characters, or to get under your skin. It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s lipstick on a pig. Color uses horrific and graphic imagery to great purpose, and with great restraint. There is build-up and payoff to when it needs to get graphic, so that when you finally see the visceral violence or the unspeakable horror, it has impact. Mandy wants to go for a more slasher movie approach, but the kills are kept to the last 30 minutes of a 2 hour movie, and none of them feel cathartic. The movie has dragged on for so long, there’s no relief, no fist-pumping sympathy with the main character as he kills someone. Also, there’s an odd sluggishness to it all. The kills feel like they’re occurring in slow motion and without any impact. Color spent its time letting viewers getting to know the family before plunging it into Hell. Mandy couldn’t care less. Main character Red is a vehicle for violence. The TWO GROUPS of villains are given nothing beyond “they’re in a cult” and “they’re in a biker gang”. Mandy herself is given traits, but nothing beyond them. She likes to draw. She works at a gas station. And then she’s dead. Color gives Nic Cage’s eccentric performance tendencies context. The meteor warps the fabric of time, space, and reality, so naturally, sanity would also be torn apart. That makes Nic Cage’s outbursts and bizarre speech emphasis choices and such have a framework. When Mandy asks Nic Cage to do anything but sleepwalk, it seems like it wants him to do his weird thing for the sake of it, as if it is fulfilling a meme. Color starts in our world, the natural world, a world we’re all familiar with, and then slowly tears it apart. It gives us reason to expect insanity and fear whatever unnatural and unthinkable, eldritch horror might come next. Mandy seems to exist in a world we do not know, and it has no interest in introducing or defining. The viewer is thrust into it, without boundaries or rules, and proceeds from there. A man can crush another man’s skull with his bare hands? A man can have an arrow shot through his throat and survive? Survive a satab wound from a knife at least six inches long, into the ribs and up to the hilt? Sure, why not.  Mandy reeks of a movie made by a director with their head stuffed firmly up their own keester, and too self-absorbed for anyone else to break through to him. I’m not saying this movie could’ve been saved, because, stripped of its artifice, it is a hollow nothing of a movie you’ve seen a thousand times before. It is half of the filmographies of Seagal, Van Damme, and other C-tier action stars. It’s John Wick, minus the world-building and ballet of violence. It is all this bottom-shelf crap, gussied up to look like art and distract viewers from the fact that it has nothing going for it whatsoever. No character, no story, no nothing.