About one hour into Panos Cosmatos’s horror-fantasy-thriller Mandy, I thought: “Nicolas Cage is surprisingly… subdued.” Playing a gruff logger deeply in love with the titular dreamy metalhead (Andrea Riseborough), with whom he lives in a mystical, misty woodland in the 1980s, Cage had seemed positively mellow.
About 10 minutes of screen time after I had this thought, Cage was alternately screaming and swigging from a bottle while stomping around a bathroom in a T-shirt and tighty-whities. Let the fan service commence!
The basic plot of Mandy, despite its fantastical flourishes, is nothing you haven’t seen before: Contented middle-aged man witnesses a hideous act of violence against his beloved; very discontented man employs an overabundance of esoteric weapons to wreak awful revenge.
