Left Field Cinema

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane opens with one of the best deaths in slasher film history, a bold statement, I know, but it is incredibly mature in its execution and perfectly sets the tone of the film, making us realise this film is bravely made, and will not back away from the director’s vision.

As the film begins, Mandy (Amber Heard, Pineapple Express) and Emmet (Michael Welch, Twilight), her best friend, go to a party hosted by typical “jock”, Dylan. Through a certain series of events, Emmet ends up convincing Dylan to jump from his roof into the pool, for the sole purpose of impressing Mandy Lane. Of course, he misses the pool, but instead of showing him hitting the concrete before tumbling into the pool, we do not see the impact, but instead the camera angelically floats down to the pool. We hear the sound of his body smashing against the ground and then we see the body in the pool, friends and fellow jocks fleeing to help. Nine months later and Mandy Lane is near the end of her junior year, and in celebration a group of ‘friends’ convince her to accompany them to a remote ranch over the weekend, and thus begins the slaughter.

Initially, the most striking thing about All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is the aesthetics. Darren Genet has created a dreamily hyper-real, bleached out look more akin to The Virgin Suicides than Friday the 13th. The motives behind this choice of look is pretty clear, the film deals with the blank dissatisfaction and disaffection of the youth just as much as it is concerned with the inventive killings. The film is based entirely in reality, rather than focusing on porn star bodied teens in a sex comedy gone wrong; these characters constantly worry about body fat, pubic hair and breast/penis size, showing not only slasher cinema awareness, but social awareness as well.

Each of the actors had to deal with simple character stereotypes that you would find in any American high school film, yet none of the teens feel one-dimensional, transcending the stereotypes they are based around and coming across as real, flawed and dislikeable people. Centre stage is Amber Heard as the titular Mandy Lane, who handles an incredibly difficult role. Orphaned at a young age, her careful demeanor is constantly mistaken as her playing hard to get. No one sees the hurt that underlines her character. Amber Heard shows a perfect mix of awkwardness and awareness of power over both the “boys” and the girls who lust after the boys.

It is clear that the director (Jonathan Levine, The Wackness) and writer (Jacob Forman) know their conventions and clichés. The horror is excellent, the gore is perfect, not feeling gratuitous or over the top, but gritty, real and painful. The scares, surprisingly, come from diegetic sound, the likes of shotgun sounds or skulls cracking rather than a cheap shriek of strings that lesser filmmakers would use. It shows that they were confident in their approach to the material and stuck to it throughout production. The film delivers on every level of slasher clichés, but also has a real kick in the teeth at the end.

As the blood flows and the “bush” and “tits” appear, the film succeeds where so many others have not; it perfectly recreates a bygone era of the‘80’s slasher films in recent times, but without resorting to the post-Scream extent of self reference, but instead it knows exactly what it wants to do, and does it. In short, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is a criminally underrated, genuinely well made film that should be seen by anybody that likes serious, proper scares.

Sam Boullier