Mandy: Cosmatos, Cage, and Grief Rendered in Lava Light

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Mandy is the film that convinced a lot of people Nicolas Cage was serious again, though anyone who had been paying attention knew he had never stopped being interesting. What Panos Cosmatos’s second feature actually did was find the exact frame that Cage’s late style demands: a slow, hallucinatory, lava-lit revenge tragedy where a man’s grief is so large it has to be rendered in colour and distortion because no naturalistic performance could contain it. Released in 2018, eight years after Cosmatos’s glacial debut, it arrived looking like a heavy-metal album sleeve someone had learned to animate, and it turned out to have a broken heart at the centre.

Nicolas Cage - vo.rs

Mandy: Cosmatos, Cage, and Grief Rendered in Lava Light