Mandy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A woman reads in bed. Lamplight catches one side of her face, the rest of the room has gone to black, and the shot holds well past the point of usefulness. You stop watching for information and start just watching her. The paperback in her hands has cover art in the same airbrushed dream-space the film will eventually become, which is a joke and also the entire design: Mandy Bloom reads and draws this stuff, and by the second half we are inside her library.

That held face tells you what kind of movie this is long before the axe does.

Deleuze opens his cinema books with a distinction he takes from Bergson. Older arts rendered movement through privileged instants: the pose, the frieze, the single attitude that stands in for a whole action. Cinema broke with that. It samples motion in any-instant-whatever, ordinary equidistant slices, no one of them more important than the rest, and movement arises from their flow. That break is a great deal of what made film modern.

Cosmatos runs it backward. Benjamin Loeb frames frontally and symmetrically, centers his figures, arranges bodies like the panels of an album gatefold, and holds the composition until it turns oppressive. Each shot is a plate. This is where the usual complaint about the film goes wrong: Mandy is not failing at continuity, it is declining to use it, and the refusal has a pedigree. Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain composed its images as painted panels, static and frontal, and Cosmatos takes that grammar whole. Even the slaughter in the back half keeps a tableau rhythm instead of accelerating into coverage. Bazin praised the long take because continuous space preserved the world's ambiguity. Cosmatos holds just as long in order to sever space instead.

He can afford that because colour is doing the work geography usually does. Deleuze describes a colour-image in which colour stops belonging to objects and absorbs the scene entire, registering a state rather than describing a thing. The red-and-blue duotone recurs so relentlessly it becomes the film's weather, and it descends straight from Argento: Suspiria flooded faces and walls with saturated primaries from light sources that had no business existing in the room. The man in this film is named Red. The colour has him before the plot does.

Space follows. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is a space that has lost its coordinates and no longer functions as a place where action can be located. You cannot map the Shadow Mountains. Cabin, compound, treeline, all gel-lit and deliberately vague, single figures carved out of void-black negative space. These are states rather than locations, which is why a film shot in Belgium feels like it happens inside weather.

Then the cult takes her, and the film's moral temperature changes. Jeremiah Sand puts himself on display for his captive: a failed folk musician, certain of his own divinity, needing to be adored right now. She can do nothing at all. In Deleuze's vocabulary she has become a seer, someone whose motor connection to the situation has been cut and who can only look and listen because no action is available to her. Out of that pure optical situation she produces the one response still hers. She laughs. Nothing in the movie is more violent than that laugh. The mediocre man cannot survive being seen accurately, and everything that follows is his revenge on a moment of correct perception.

The two performances split Deleuze's two poles of the close-up between two people. Riseborough gives a reflecting face, contoured and watchful, holding a quality without ever discharging it. Cage, after her death, is the other pole: the intensive face, micro-movements stacking toward a threshold and then blowing past it, the bathroom scene where he drinks and screams. The film is engineered as a handoff between these faces. One goes out; the other ignites.

What it hands off into is the best-grounded Deleuzian category here, and the least expected. He calls it the impulse-image, and its logic is naturalist: beneath an ordinary derived milieu lies an originary world of raw appetite, where behaviour reads as symptom and everything slopes downhill toward exhaustion and death. Mandy's derived milieu is a logger, a cabin, pine trees, 1983. Its originary world is the Shadow Mountains, where a blast on a horn brings demonic bikers out of the dark. Jeremiah is an appetite with a congregation. The dossier's phrase for him is exact and worth keeping: petty male grievance raised to metaphysics, which is precisely the size of villain this regime produces. Objects here work as fetishes, part-objects charged with compulsion rather than use: the horn, the drugs, the crossbow, and above all the axe Red forges himself in a scene that roars like a foundry. Bill Duke turns up long enough to arm him. He does not find a weapon. He manufactures a relic.

The images behave accordingly. Brett Bachman lets dissolves run so long that one face becomes another, so scenes and identities bleed into each other. Deleuze's onirosign, the dream-image, is exactly this: a hallucinatory circuit that never anchors to a datable memory, so you cannot say where it began. And the texture is itself a hallucination of a texture. The optical vocabulary of flare, diffusion, smear and superimposition is rebuilt digitally, so the picture reads as a memory of 1980s film stock rather than a copy of one. That is not nostalgia. It is a dream of a medium, and it is Cosmatos's specific invention, worked out first in Beyond the Black Rainbow, whose glacial dissolves and single-hue rooms are the template Mandy amplifies.

Narratively the film keeps the oldest engine in commercial cinema and refuses to start it. Revenge is the large form of the action-image: a situation presses on a man until he acts decisively enough to transform it. Cosmatos retains that skeleton at maximum simplicity, then loads it with everything the action-image cannot digest: held faces, drugged tableaux, and a Jóhann Jóhannsson score of sludge guitar and curdled orchestra that generates the film's altered state instead of underlining its events. It was among the last things he finished before his death in February 2018. The plot is a rail, not a motor. Which is why Mandy can be summarized in one sentence and still cannot be paraphrased.

Its debts are specific. El Topo gave it the near-wordless mythic quest built as ritual stations instead of plot. Jodorowsky gave it the frontal tableau, Argento the unmotivated gel, Heavy Metal the Frazetta-and-Corben pulp bank it raids for barbarians, Conan the Barbarian the notion that grief-fuelled vengeance could be scored like liturgy. What it seeded is a decade's revival of stylized analog-nostalgic genre film, and a working proof that a modestly budgeted picture funded through the boutique-and-VOD ecosystem could be this formally extreme and still find its audience. It also did something odd and permanent to an actor: it reframed Cage's long run of low-budget genre work as a resource rather than a decline, by finally building a frame worthy of that register.

Watch it again for the transfer. Mandy reads fantasy paperbacks and draws in their idiom; she is killed; the world of the film becomes that idiom entirely. The question it never answers, and shouldn't: is the second half Red's revenge, or is it Mandy's imagination still running after the person holding it is gone?