Of the many films that premiered at Sundance this year, Italian-Canadian director Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy looks to be one of the weirdest. Obviously, this is due to the fact that it stars Nicolas Cage, but the horror movie’s first trailer and accompanying plot description add plenty of bloody, gory weight to such a claim. Along with Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Ned Dennehy, Olwen Fouéré, Richard Brake and Bill Duke, Mandy finds Cage at the center of a cult’s decisions to rip apart two lovers in the Pacific Northwest (quite literally).
Per the trailer’s plot description:
Pacific Northwest. 1983 AD. Outsiders Red Miller and Mandy Bloom lead a loving and peaceful existence. When their pine-scented haven is savagely destroyed by a cult led by the sadistic Jeremiah Sand, Red is catapulted into a phantasmagoric journey filled with bloody vengeance and laced with fire.
Judging by the trailer’s highly stylistic visual tone, which swings between empty darkness and blood-red hues, Mandy looks and sounds precisely like what Cage has been doing with his career as of late. (See: Mom and Dad, in which he played a loving father turned child-craving zombie.) Then again, who doesn’t want to see Cage dress himself in armor made from what appears to be junkyard scrap, wildly swinging a massive scythe at his enemies? Mandy Cage-screams into theaters on September 14th.
