Rating of
3.5/4
The most stylish & brutal thriller since DRIVE.
Indyfreak - wrote on 12/07/18
MANDY (2018) is not for the faint of heart or the easily distressed. It is a dark brutal movie that holds nothing back. It is a revenge thriller that is firing on all cylinders through a blood red soaked landscape marked by violence and carnage.
Red (Cage) is a logger who lives with his sweetheart Mandy (Riseborough) until the day they cross paths with an evil cult and their fiendish leader Jeremiah Sand (actor is appropriately named Roache). Red is tortured while Mandy is killed by the cultits, leading Red to embark on a vengeful campaign against Sand and his followers.
The movie is admittedly slow paced;even I had no idea where it was going. But the horrific acts of violence and the sudden bursts of emotional turmoil startled me more so than most horror movies. The dreamlike scenery is almost always in shadow and seems otherworldly even though we're firmly established in the 1980s Pacific Northwest.
Action scenes are punctuated by chainsaws clashing, and vicious dismemberment happening at random. Nicolas Cage gives his best performance in decades as a man driven beyond hope that lives solely as a force of nature hellbent for his own brand of vengeance.
