Mandy review: horrible and ludicrous, this is an all-time-great Nicolas Cage wig-out

Dir: Panos Cosmatos; Starring: Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Olwen Fouéré. 18 cert, 121 mins.

Nicolas Cage’s more extreme performances have been derided as a blight on cinema for years, but it turns out that cinema just had to catch up. Mandy, the new film from Panos Cosmatos, is the ideal stage for an all-time-great Cage wig-out – plus much more, which we’ll come to – and the actor ferociously obliges.

The year is 1983, and Cage plays Red, as in rag: a taciturn lumberjack who lives in a humble woodland cabin with the love of his life, Mandy, who is played in a dazzlingly committed, transfixingly weird performance by Andrea Riseborough. Unluckily for both, a doomsday cult pitches up in the area, and their leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) earmarks Mandy as a “chosen one”, and abducts her with the help of the Black Skulls – three nightmarishly costumed, slime-oozing goons, who could be LSD-frazzled Hell’s Angels, or actual demons, or both.

This sets in motion a grisly downward spiral which sends Red on a phantasmagorical revenge spree, involving a crossbow whose quarrels “cut through bone like a fat kid through cake,” according to their maker (a nice cameo for Bill Duke), and a freshly forged, four-pointed axe called The Beast.

It is easy to picture a version of Mandy that archly works its way though a grungy genre checklist, but Cosmatos’s film does nothing of the kind: equal parts splatter horror and gallery installation, it unfolds in a billowing, dreamy narcosis that is unlike anything else around.

Naturally, small parts of it evoke small parts of other films: there are dabs of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, soup?ons of Nicolas Winding Refn, generous splashes of Sam Raimi and Dario Argento. Three brief cartoon sequences invoke the X-rated spirit of the 1981 animation Heavy Metal – and the overall feel is often of a living, breathing, pulsating version of a heavy metal LP sleeve, with its mad chainsaw fantasy aesthetic.

The outstanding score, which drifts between sighing, swelling synths and apocalyptic thunder-crashes of electric guitar, was the last to be completed by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannson before his death earlier this year.

But Mandy’s total commitment to its bizarre, time-and-space-warping vision, queasily upends the usual retro dynamic: rather than reminding you of things you used to like, it fills you with the uneasy sense that you half-remember things you’ve never seen before in your life. Take the advertisement for a brand of macaroni cheese called Cheddar Goblin that flickers across Red’s television screen late one night, which involves a Ghoulies-style puppet vomiting the meal onto children’s plates.

It is unnerving and revolting and hilarious – but also feels just enough like a junk food ad of yore to be also creepily plausible. (The sequence was realised by Casper Kelly, the director of Too Many Cooks, a horror-comedy short that went viral in 2014.)

It is against this backdrop that Cage gives his best performance since Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant in 2009: the 54-year-old actor recently branded himself “the California Klaus Kinski”, only semi-jokingly, and it is now clear that he requires a Kinski-strength collaborator behind the camera: a Herzog, or a David Lynch, or a Michael Bay, or a Panos Cosmatos.

There is an extraordinary sequence in which a heartbroken Red blunders into the bathroom, guzzles vodka and goes deranged with grief in a manner that to me recalled the way Popeye used to squeeze open a tin of spinach then hover in the air while a cartoon steam train chuffed across his bicep. This is a film that exists in its own supremely unnerving dimension: the dictionary definition of Not For Everyone, perhaps, but a required trip for everyone else.

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