Movie review: Nicolas Cage achieves Grand Guignol greatness in hallucinogenic 'Mandy'

<h3 class="briefHead">"Mandy" - ★ ★ ★ </h3>

Oh, "Mandy."

Well, she came and she gave without taking.

And the cult crazies took her away.

Now, Mandy's lover, lumberjack Red Miller, embarks on a bizarre bender of burbling blood, blistering blazes and beastly brutality to avenge her agonizing death.

In Panos Cosmatos' hellishly hallucinatory "Mandy," sheer exploitative trash collides with art-house pretentiousness to give Nicolas Cage the insanely obsessed, way, way over-the-top character he has been preparing for since playing Little Junior Brown in 1995's "Kiss of Death."

Cage treats Red Miller not as a knocked-out, one-note vigilante, but as a full-blown Shakespearean figure filled with vengeful wrath.

While witnessing his lover, Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), being burned alive inside a burlap sack, Cage's soulful eyes convey anguish, horror and disbelief on an emotional scale I have never witnessed in a film before.

Red says surprisingly few words in this freaky odyssey into the dark side, yet he gives us everything we need to know to bond with him, support him and be with him through some of the most vile and violent ordeals seen since "The Hills Have Eyes."

"Mandy" begins in the Pacific Northwest during 1983 when Red and Mandy share an idyllic, peaceful lifestyle.

A self-annointed messiah named Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) and his Children of a New Dawn (including Ned Dennehy's obsequious Brother Swan and Olwen Foure's witchlike Mother Marlene) see the lovely Mandy walking in the forest.

"Get that girl I saw!" Jeremiah commands.

Brother Swan whips out some kind of ancient relic whistle, plays a few bars and says, "We wait."

In due time, a ghostly gang of spiked, LSD-overdosed mutants from the set of Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" appears, ready to abduct Mandy and deliver her to Jeremiah.

But when Mandy rejects the Children of the Dawn and their leader, Jeremiah orders her soul cleansed with fire, and forces Red, semi-crucified with barbed wire, to watch.

Springboarding off his stylish, polarizing 2010 debut feature "Beyond the Black Rainbow," Cosmatos has created something more than a mere movie, a hot and fiery cinematic experience along the order of "Dante's Inferno" infused with elements from "The Manson Family."

"Mandy" moves slowly, perhaps because Cosmatos wants us to fully absorb the extraordinary crimson details in dense, ornately mounted shots that employ animation, strobe-lights, superimpositions and plenty of red filters.

Or perhaps it tries just a little too hard to be an instant cult-classic thriller.

Imagine Robin Williams' kaleidoscopic trip through the underworld in "What Dreams May Come," but with fiery flames as the dominant motif in a raw and gory tale of retribution.

That's Cosmatos' "Mandy."

Not Barry Manilow's.

<b>Starring:</b> Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Ned Dennehy

<b>Directed by:</b> Panos Cosmatos

<b>Other:</b> An RLJE Films release. At Chicago's Music Box. No MPAA rating; contains graphic violence, raw language. 120 minutes