Between Worlds is a 2018 action thriller about a man who meets a woman who can spiritually contact the dead, leading to consequences beyond his control.
A Nicholas Cage movie has become practically a genre all its own, the mere fact he’s part of a cast making it a conscious choice by the director that he or she is willing to have it all overshadowed by his presence alone. Sometimes it works. This year’s earlier Mandy is a perfect example where story and Cage collide in cinematic bliss. Now comes Maria Pulera‘s weird Between Worlds, which seems to want Cage to be his Cage-iness but in the execution, spins right out of control, clearly hoping to be experimental but ultimately just plain loopy.
Cage is Joe, a lonely trucker who has yet to really recover from the loss of his wife Mary (Lydia Hearst) and daughter Sarah. Disheveled and out of sorts, he one night finds himself seemingly saving the life of Julie (Franke Potente), who is getting strangled in a bathroom stall. Turns out, it’s not what it seems. Julie is able to slip into the spiritual world but only while suffocating, using this power to try and help her daughter Billie (Penelope Mitchell), who was in a terrible accident. Joe sticks with Julie, starting a sexual relationship, eventually bringing Billie home from the hospital, though things take a turn when Billie seems to be possessed by Mary, wanting to restart her love with Joe.
I mean, you only need to reread that paragraph again (which you may already have done just to make sure you read it right the first time) to know that this isn’t a usual trip to the movies. Cage decks himself out in a mop of stringy hair, a dirty trucker hat and raggedy T-shirt, flopping about like he’s in the last stages of a hallucinatory drug binge. The rest of the cast are strangely off center as well, seemingly purposefully acting and speaking like they are pretending to be bad actors even though they aren’t. It’s hard to describe.
While the spooky other-wordly colors of Between Worlds is briefly explored, this is more of an awkward sexual fantasy where Joe doesn’t quite get that his wife is in the body of a sexually-maturing teen girl (who looks like she’s well into her 30s) while he sleeping with her mother. This creates moments where Billie, who is hosting the spirit of Mary, watches Joe and Julie get it on all jealous like. It’s a wacky elixir that doesn’t go down all that smoothly, the movie trying to make excuses for Billie’s behavior while Cage just jumps into the driver’s seat and drives this whole thing at full speed off a cliff. You’ll spend a good deal of the time wondering what the heck is going on?
Obviously, Pulera is doing much of the absurdity on purpose, freeling letting Cage careen into the corners while trying to make the rest of it as low-rent weird as possible. That would be excusable of course if the film itself had some better mystery to it, the conceit only a weak excuse to get the triangle relationship started. It’s an empty experience that teases something more lurid than it is and far less ethereal than it should be.