Nicolas Cage’s Forthcoming Film Mandy Sounds Kind of Awesome

Nicolas Cage’s never-ending quest to pay for nerdy shit like pygmy shrunken heads has led him to some weird jobs. For every legitimately excellent Nicolas Cage film like Matchstick Men or Raising Arizona, there seem to be a dozen Wicker Man and Left Behind movies. It’s a highly prolific career that belies his perpetual money troubles.

All that to say, the man is actually a great actor when he is attached to a worthwhile product, and Cage’s new movie, Mandy, looks like it may be just that type of film. Directed by Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow), Cage will play Red Miller, “a broken and haunted man [who] hunts an unhinged religious sect who slaughtered the love of his life,” per Deadline.

The film is produced by both Elijah Wood’s SpectreVision (A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night) and XYZ films (I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore). Given those studio’s pedigrees, we can expect a film that promises to be both gore-filled and surreal in the best possible ways. The film is set in 1983 and begins filming this summer over in Belgium.

Daniel Noah, SpectreVision’s Head of Development, beautifully explains why we should be excited for this forthcoming masterpiece:

Panos is one of the most vital young filmmakers alive, a pop-culture Kubrick in the making. Nicolas Cage is a veritable god to those of us who grew up watching his classic performances. Bringing these two together for this surrealist, heavy-metal-soaked story of battle axes and demon bikers is unfathomably exciting to us.

We’ll second that.