How many ways can we re-imagine the rape-revenge formula this year?
Eli Roth redid Death Wish by removing the rape from the original (knowing that we all know it is missing), and simultaneously indulging in the male fantasy while exposing the male toxicity of the revenge fantasy.
Then, Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge turned the original formula inside out by adding feminist tweaks: toning down the rape, inverting the male and female gaze, giving the female protagonist a symbolic erection for the second act of the movie, and eyeballing a naked bloody male during the climax of the film.
Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy offers a third version that does visual and metatextual spins on the history of the subgenre without saying much of anything new.
Cosmatos brings us back to the murder cabin in the woods, a glass-paned home where blue-collar Red Miller (Nicholas Cage) and his convenience-store girlfriend Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) rest under starry nights while wearing Motley Crue and Black Sabbath T-Shirts. While reading a horror novel at work, Mandy garners the attention of LSD-addled Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) and his Jesus Freak cult of drug-addicted morons and pseudo-Cenobytes. The cult invades Red and Mandy’s home with the intent of converting Mandy through rape and drugs while tying up Red and making him watch. Later, Red goes crazy and seeks bloody revenge using a variety of instruments including a Final Fantasy sword and a chainsaw.
Set in 1983, Mandy has the visual sensibilities of prog rock/black metal album covers, the Heavy Metal comic strip, and those cheesy airbrushed skyscapes on the side of 1970s stoner conversion vans. Cosmatos mingles the plot and grandiose visual cues to invert the old Metalhead Satanic Panic of the 80s by villainizing the Christian cultists and victimizing the rockers. Don’t fear the metalheads, it was the metalheads who had to fear you.
Even though Mandy is adorned with a slow-patient pacing and an over-the-top aesthetic palette, Mandy is a rape-revenge movie at its black core. In act 2, Mandy is drugged, violated, and fridged so that, in act 3, Red can toughen up and seek vengeance on Mandy’s violators. Red loses his mind to horror and grief in a bathroom while slugging alcohol in his tighty-whiteys followed by a montage of Red making the anime sword with his bare hands to demonstrate rebuilding his strength.
There really isn’t that much to talk about with Mandy, a movie made to be experienced on a big screen if experienced at all. Cosmatos’ hypnotic pacing and stylized visuals almost lulls you into forgetting that Mandy is a simple-minded grindhouse movie with nothing too deep on its mind beyond “what if we traveled into the world of a Judas Priest album cover?” Cage doesn’t even start to get ready for revenge for over an hour of the movie. While you’re waiting, Cosmatos makes you watch a bunch of Manson-esque followers harass people in cliched ways that would be considered boring even if Rob Zombie had never made House of 1000 Corpses or The Devil’s Rejects.
On the other hand, there were people holding their hands over their eyes at the screening I was at, and plenty of sucking of teeth during key moments. So, maybe I’m just jaded.
