Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Mandy
2018 · Panos Cosmatos · Mandy on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the red and blue take over whole scenes. (light)
Benjamin Loeb floods the frame from colored directional sources that no lamp in the room could explain. The duotone comes back so often it stops describing objects and starts setting the weather.
Payoff: Color is carrying the mood the way another film would carry it with dialogue. The man is even named Red. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: the hue stops belonging to things in the room and absorbs the whole scene as a state.
Notice how long a centered shot holds before it cuts. (camera)
Cosmatos frames frontally and symmetrically, puts one figure dead center against black, and stays there well past the point of usefulness. Bodies are arranged like panels on an album gatefold.
Payoff: You stop gathering information and start looking. Each shot is built as a plate rather than a link in a chain. In the reading: privileged-instants. The reading calls these privileged instants: poses held up for inspection instead of ordinary slices of continuous motion.
Look at the cover art on the book Mandy reads. (setting)
She reads airbrushed fantasy paperbacks and draws in the same idiom. Doom and black metal sleeves, Frazetta barbarians, occult symbols. The design of the whole film comes out of that shelf.
Payoff: The film tells you where its look comes from by putting it in a character's hands in the first reel.
Listen for the score becoming a low, distorted drone. (sound)
Johann Johannsson drops the spare neoclassical writing he was known for and delivers sludge guitar, heavy synth and orchestral swells that curdle into noise. It was among the last work he completed.
Payoff: The music does not follow the events. It generates the altered state you watch them in.
Watch Riseborough's face hold still while she listens. (performance)
Riseborough plays Mandy watchful and interior, giving almost nothing away while men talk at her. Roache plays Jeremiah Sand as a mediocre man who needs to be adored immediately.
Payoff: The film sets a face that holds against a face that demands. That contrast decides everything that follows.
Once you have seen it
Track the objects the film treats like relics. (setting)
A horn that calls the bikers, the drugs passed around, the crossbow, and above all the axe Red forges himself in a scene that roars like a foundry. Bill Duke arrives only to arm him.
Payoff: He does not find a weapon lying around. He manufactures one, and the film gives each object more weight than any line of dialogue. In the reading: fetish. The reading calls these fetishes: objects charged with compulsion rather than use, carrying the appetite the story runs on.
Watch Cage cross from muted to howling in one scene. (performance)
He spends the first half almost silent. Then comes the bathroom, the vodka and the screaming, and he blows past every threshold at once before settling into a grim, nearly catatonic calm.
Payoff: The film is built as a handoff between two faces. One goes out and the other ignites.
Watch one face dissolve slowly into another. (cutting)
Brett Bachman lets dissolves run far longer than they need to, so scenes bleed together and people briefly share a frame of skin. The whole optical vocabulary of smear and flare was built digitally.
Payoff: You can never say exactly where an image began, which is how the film keeps identity unstable.
Compare the second half's look to Mandy's paperback covers. (structure)
The first half is a cabin, pine trees and a logger in 1983. The second is demons, a forged axe and gel-lit voids. Cosmatos never maps the Shadow Mountains, so you cannot locate any of it.
Payoff: The world of the film becomes the world she was reading, and the film never tells you whose imagination is running it.
Carry this in: Watch what Mandy reads and draws. The film eventually turns into the art on her covers.