Mandy: Simple Yet Surreal

It's the year 1983, and Red and his girlfriend Mandy live a peaceful existence, abiding in the woods of California and living off the money that Red makes as a lumberjack. Many would call it some flavor of dream existence, and yet Mandy seems less interested in the tranquility of the forest and more interested in how easily dreams can turn into nightmares. Mandy eventually attracts unwanted attention from a man named Jeremiah Sand and the vicious religious cult at his beck and call, and the greens and browns of the forest are soon plunged into a deep blood-red as a malevolent force sets its sights on Red and Mandy, bending, warping, and even breaking the peaceful reality that once was.

I used a lot of colorful imagery in the first paragraph for this review, which was intentional. The use of color in Mandy is dreamlike, similar to yet still distinct from Stranger Things. It's a display of bold artistry, taking the vision to the point of no return if it weren't to pan out - lucky for us, the pieces mesh. The look of Mandy consistently hits high marks while relentlessly pummeling us with surreal imagery like some cinematic acid trip. I kept waiting for a more conventionally-colored scene to can the eccentric visuals, to save them for some sort of payoff while settling into a more familiar vein, but Mandy is instead a nonstop assault on the senses, difficult to watch at times and yet impossible to turn away from. It places Red and Mandy in a lot of strange and sinister scenarios, each one stranger and more sinister than the last, and isn't as intensely frightening as it is the kind of movie that slowly and uncomfortably crawls under your skin, seeping into your mind like some kind of cinematic brainworm army.

Even if it does beat down new pathways visually, Mandy is contrarily content to tell a mostly recognizable revenge fable. I might even describe it as a cinematic coat of paint, as the story is familiar, but the presentation conversely quite unlike anything I've seen before. Mandy manages to tell a story that somehow remains coherent and graspable throughout, and that's a big somehow at times. Its relentless and linear simplicity certainly helps it, and the emphasis on atmospheric horror is astonishingly realized. However, Mandy is nevertheless limited by the same things that make it great. It's a story we've heard many times before that checks all the boxes you would expect, without any real surprises once it becomes clear what kind of movie it is. It takes the adage that a simple story is not necessarily a bad one far, perhaps too far at times, though it largely manages to feel fresh. Believe me when I say that for a move like this one, that's important.

All things considered, Mandy is a bold and vision-driven foray into the possibilities of cinema, an imperfect but adeptly-crafted and narratively-accessible movie that still behaves as very much its own animal, the type of movie that pays homage to other horror movies without watering down its startling vision. If someone told me that I would watch a movie where Nicholas Cage hunts cultists with a chainsaw, I would have called them crazy or asked for directions to the nearest Dollar-DVD bin, but nevertheless, life is strange. Mandy isn't just visionary in a lot of ways - it also takes the time to be a good movie as well, even if it's somewhat recognizable beneath the weird red costume as the type of revenge movie we've seen time and again. But hey, it takes on the quality of a dream, and you can't possibly dream about something you've never seen before, can you?

Mandy - 8/10

2 Corinthians 11:12-15