Beyond the Black Rainbow: The Synth-Drenched Slow Nightmare

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Before Mandy gave Panos Cosmatos a cult and a Nicolas Cage-shaped calling card, there was Beyond the Black Rainbow, a 2010 debut so patient, so cold and so committed to its own airless mood that it repels roughly half the people who start it. That is by design. This is a film built to be a test — of your tolerance for silence, for stillness, for a nightmare that unfolds at the pace of a lava lamp — and the reward for passing it is one of the most singular sensory experiences in modern genre cinema. I think it is the more interesting of Cosmatos’s two features, even if it is plainly the harder one to love.

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.

Panos Cosmatos - vo.rs

Beyond the Black Rainbow: The Synth-Drenched Slow Nightmare

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