“…not something I would recommend to those who are faint of heart or mind.”

Mandy is a movie that has been getting a lot of buzz as of late, and becasue of that I made it my mission to go and see it for myself. I had no idea what the movie was about, but I knew that if everyone else liked it then chances are it is something special. I only knew two things about Mandy: It was a horror film, and it starred Nicolas Cage. Those two things alone are enough to get me interested, so hearing the praise the film was receiving was the icing on the cake. Mandy is, in essence, a film about a man who has to go on a murder-spree after a sadistic cult takes his wife.

Mandy is one of those movies that completely eludes coherent thought. I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to say about it, but more importantly I have no idea why people like it so much. Mandy is a very segmented movie. It takes the idea of ‘three act structure’ to heart and creates what is essentially three separate movies. This hurts the film in my opinion becasue the movie you want to see, Nicolas Cage killing dudes, doesn’t show up until an hour and ten minutes into the film. I will say that I found the different focuses on horror interesting. For instance, the second “movie” really focuses on making the audience confused and harbouring fear out of that. This section relied on a lot of jarring noises as well as really disorienting lights and visual effects that tried their best to get inside of your head. The film then transitions into utilizing ultra violence as means of scaring the audience, and that’s where things kind of go off the rails. Up until this point I was completely on board with Mandy being a horror film that took itself kind of seriously, but when it transitioned into a weird Evil Dead homage I was very confused.

Mandy was a weird movie. Weird doesn’t even come close to describing it in actuality. At first I likened it to the kind of movie that Rob Zombie has been trying to make for his entire life. It was strange, unsettling, and focused on a very obscure part of society. But as things kept getting weirder I found it easier to compare Mandy to a dream. No, Mandy was a dream. The movie features so many bizarre plot points as well as filmmaking techniques designed to confuse you that I cannot remember what was real and what I imagined. The way the movie is presented is wholly unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The entire experience is completely surreal. You don’t know if what you’re watching is actually happening, you don’t know how the characters got to this point, all the while everyone in the theatre around you is laughing at Nicolas Cage’s facial expressions despite you finding them deeply unsettling. Mandy is not something I would recommend to those who are faint of heart or mind.

Overall Mandy was a weird movie. It started off as a rather traditional look at horror but quickly spiralled out of control as the film went on. I don’t even know if what I remember of the movie actually happened, or if it is some strange manifestation of my mind.

I give Mandy a C

But know that this rating is very apprehensive because you can’t really put a letter grade on something like Mandy.