Mandy (Film Review)

2018 RLJE Films
Directed by: Panos Cosmatos; Written by: Panos Cosmatos and Aaron Stewart-Ahn
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Ned Dennehy, Olwen Fouéré, Richard Brake, and Bill Duke
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 121 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 7/10

Artistic trash is still trash. Case in point, 2018's macabre de jour, Mandy, a film whose plot involves Nicholas Cage taking bloody revenge on deranged cult members and their possibly demonic biker gang accomplices. Director, Panos Cosmatos, does a bunch of weird things with lighting and sound, often filming scenes so they are monochromatically red, green, blue, or yellow, while the harsh, droning soundtrack by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson drowns out the majority of the film's dialogue.
Is the movie any good? Define good. The protagonist is given no depth or characterization, other than, "Hey, it's Nicholas Cage." No one is given much depth, other than Linus Roache's unhinged cult leader, who explains to a captive Andrea Riseborough's cypher-riphic Mandy why he believes he can just do whatever he wants. Roache's performance, as well as that of essentially everyone but the subdued Riseborough and a calmly menacing Bill Duke as an old friend of Cage, can best be described as "batshit crazy." Indeed, how much one enjoys this film will lead to a direct correlation to how much they enjoy something that is spectacularly insane.
Cage gets in a chainsaw fight with a looming thug, filmed almost entirely in silhouette. It's awesome. Cage gets into a bloody fight with the demon biker gang, then, in an example of the film's pitch black humor, blows through their vast stash of stimulants and hallucinogens, capping the scene by lighting a cigarette off of one of their disembodied, burning heads. Yeah, that's pretty cool. At moments, the film inexplicably switches to animation, and at others, the sky is suddenly populated with multiple moons, as if the film is taking place on a different planet, despite Mandy's myriad 80's metal t-shirts. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't entertained.
Even in the film's first half, which is almost solely comprised of Cage and Riseborough lovingly staring at each other, engaging in romantic small talk, while the synth-score drones hypnotically, and the frame is inundated with artificial light, the film engaged me. I like hypnotic, batshit crazy movies.
However, despite this insanity, Mandy goes no deeper than its strange aesthetics, pulpy violence, and absolutely rote and generic to the point that it's just the exact archetype of revenge plot. The best metaphor for Mandy I can think of comes from a scene in the film itself:
Cage, caked in blood, and muttering incoherently, approaches a mysterious church, bathed in red light, and finds a mysterious hole full of red, glowing smoke beneath the pulpit. When he climbs down, there's nothing at the bottom but an ordinary room.