Mandy

1983, the Shadow Mountains. Red Miller is a lumberjack. He and Mandy Bloom live in a cabin deep in the forest — she reads dark fantasy novels and paints strange art; they are entirely content. The Children of the New Dawn, a cult led by Jeremiah Sand, a failed folk singer who has convinced himself he is divine, pass through the area. Sand sees Mandy walking on the road and becomes instantly, pathologically obsessed with her.

Sand dispatches his followers and summons the Black Skulls — a demonic biker gang, barely human, bound to a black horn — to take them. Red is bound in barbed wire and left outside. Inside, Sand performs a ritual seduction for Mandy while the cult watches, certain of his own power. Mandy, despite the toxins they have given her, looks at Sand and laughs. She is completely unimpressed. Sand is humiliated in front of his believers.

He has Mandy burned alive in a body bag in front of Red. Red is tied to a tree and left with it. He frees himself when they are gone.

What follows is not a plan — it's a derangement. Red finds a stash of cocaine and vodka and comes apart completely in his bathroom, a grief that has nowhere to go. Then he goes to his friend Carruthers, gets a crossbow and what information exists about Sand and the Skulls, and forges a massive battle axe at a glowing anvil. The film shifts into pure psychedelic fury.

Red kills the Black Skulls one by one — brutal, strange, scored like a descent. He moves through the cult the same way. He finds Jeremiah Sand last. Sand is small and terrified without his believers around him, nothing like the prophet he performed. Red kills him.

The film ends with Red driving through darkness, Mandy's face appearing in the glass before him — grief given a shape, or a vision, or just the thing he carries now.