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Fantastic Fest Review: ‘Between Worlds’ boasts a gonzo Nic Cage

Between Worlds

For the next few days, we’ll be providing remote coverage of Fantastic Fest, one of the US’s best genre film festivals. For more information, check out their website, and click here for the rest of our coverage.

It’s a tale as old as time: Boy meets girl, they get married, have a child, girl and child perish in house fire, and girl comes back from the beyond to possess the daughter of boy’s new girlfriend. Wait, what?

That’s the plot of Maria Pulera’s Between Worlds, a bizarro b-movie stacked to the gills with odd choices and silly moments that still somehow manages not to be terrible. That’s partially thanks to the efforts of Nicolas Cage, here playing a sweat-drenched trucker who alternates between draining his flask and downing caffeine pills, who manages to rescue a German trucker (Franka Potente) from being strangled in a truck stop bathroom by a random loser. It turns out, however, that the woman — whose daughter (Penelope Mitchell) has just been in a terrible accident — wanted to be choked, for when she’s near death, she’s able to enter the spirit world and rescue those about to leave their bodies.

At this point, it looks like Between Worlds will be some sort of redneck Flatliners, but the daughter wakes up, possessed by the spirit of Cage’s dead wife (Lydia Hearst). So, it becomes a bizarre love triangle between the world’s sexiest beer-gutted loser, an inexplicably German trucker, and her ethereally weird daughter. I understand if you don’t want to watch this anymore.

Cage’s ferocious oddness keeps the movie afloat, as it’s his choices — ranging from embodying the sweaty film noir protagonist that this needs to being his own brand of loose cannon psycho — that make Between Worlds more than a simple evocation of Twin Peaks. I couldn’t help but notice similarities between these two works, though Pulera’s realization of that show’s tone can’t match Lynch’s, nor can it compete on a thematic or personal level. Both find humor in these small-town blue-collar dramas, both feature some sort of psychosexual interaction with the supernatural, and both are concerned with possession. And you most definitely know what you’re getting when you pay Peaks composer and frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti to write your film’s theme (unsurprisingly, he kills it here).

But, again, Cage’s raw weirdness brings an unstable element to the formula: There are at least five scenes in this film that may very well live on in infamy on r/onetruegod, like a scene where Cage relaxes with an evening doob, or when he’s having sex — in two different time periods — while reading from a book that the actual Nicolas Cage apparently authored. If you are in the market for this, you undoubtedly will be thoroughly entertained.

Featured image via Fantastic Fest.