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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch what Mandy reads and draws. The film's look comes from the art on her covers.