Nicolas Cage is a national treasure. There are very few actors out there willing to take the chances he takes, and it looks like he is taking one hell of a crazy chance with Mandy.
Because this trailer is insane. Like, chainsaw fight insane.
Before we get to the basic story, here’s a hint at what an experience this could be: Mandy premiered at a Sundance midnight showing, and people walked out, apparently disturbed by graphic violence—but it also has a 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Written by Aaron Stewart-Ahn and Panos Cosmatos, Mandy is about Cage‘s lumberjack character Red Miller and wife Mandy (Andrea Riseborough). The synopsis tells us it’s the 1980s and they are living the good life in the woods of the Pacific Northwest when “their pine-scented haven is savagely destroyed by a cult led by the sadistic Jeremiah Sand.”
Sand apparently develops a little crush on Mandy or something and Cage’s Red “is catapulted into a phantasmagoric journey filled with bloody vengeance and laced with fire.”
So, that’s like just another weekday for Nicolas Cage.
The actor has been in some truly bad (but still often entertaining) movies. The trailer for Mandy and various early reviews hint he’s onto something with this coked-out wonder of an evil cult-monster-revenge flick. Writing for RogerEbert.com, critic Nick Allen says that if the movie’s “sole goal was to take the heavyweight title of Nicolas Cage’s Craziest Movie Ever, ‘Mandy’ exhibits what Shakespeare called ‘vaulting ambition’ in producing the nuttiest ways for Cage to get into one phantasmagorical showdown after the next.”
Who wouldn’t be kicking down the doors of the theater to watch that?
We’re a little bummed he won’t be wearing a dinosaur skull as he unleashes his mighty vengeance on the cultists, but we know Nicolas Cage will deliver.
Mandy is in theaters on Sept. 14th.