Even by Nicolas Cage Standards the Sexed-Up Supernatural Mind-Fuck Between Worlds is Agreeably Insane
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The 2018 mind-fuck Between Worlds is the craziest fucking thing you’ve ever seen in your whole goddamn life. Yet it is, also, confusingly, maybe the twentieth most batshit movie star Nicolas Cage has made over the course of his glorious, gloriously checkered career.
The free-floating craziness begins with Nicolas Cage playing a long-haul trucker wearing what appears to be an off-brand trucker costume from Spirit Halloween. Cage’s oily beard looks glued on. He’s got the mullet and the trucker’s hat and the aura of someone who goes long, tiring days without bathing or even washing his face.
Nicolas Cage is Joe, a trucker on the go. He leads a solitary life until he encounters Julie, a mysterious woman played by Run, Lola, Run’s Franka Potente being choked at a truck stop. Joe understandably thinks it’s some manner of sex thing or masochism thing or pain thing or murder thing.
It turns out to be none of the above.
In a line of dialogue that helps convey that this will be no ordinary late-period Nicolas Cage movie, Julie asks Joe if he has a family and he takes out a photograph and asks, “Wife and daughter, you like?”
When she replies that they’re beautiful, Joe responds, with inexplicable but intense irritation and misplaced sarcasm, “Oops! They’re dead!”
Cage’s delivery is perfect in its exquisite wrongheadedness. It’s not this poor woman’s fault that his son and wife are dead. She’s just a nice lady asking to be choked by strangers. She doesn’t deserve to be treated with such disrespect.
Also, it turns out that Joe’s wife isn’t anywhere near as dead as he thought. In fact she’s been lying in wait, ready to return from the dead for a little posthumous comeback.
Don’t worry. It’s not a sex thing!
Ah, but I am getting ahead of myself. It turns out that the reason that Julie wants random dudes to choke her is because when she was much younger she nearly drowned and during that time she passed through a portal to the spirit world that she can apparently access when close to death.
Julie wants to use this power to enter the spirit world so that she can retrieve her comatose daughter Billie’s (Penelope Mitchell) soul and return it to her so that she can rejoin the land of the living.
That premise would be enough for most films but it’s only the beginning of Between Worlds’s all-encompassing weirdness.
Because there would be no film otherwise, Julie’s weird trick for luring Julie out of a coma using supernatural means works. She has Joe choke her and while she’s in the realm of the unknown she grabs Julie’s soul and skedaddles back to the living.
Joe and Julie celebrate this unlikely victory over death with lots of lots of fucking. In the film’s Wikipedia page it states, “Joe accompanies Julie home and, even though Joe feels and looks as though he's been on the road for three days, they have sex.”
Joe certainly does feel and look like he’s been on the road for three days. Hell, Joe feels and looks like he’s been on the road for three long years and hasn’t touched a bar of soap or a woman in all that time.
I don’t want to gross-shame Joe but he is nasty. Yet the lonely pair are still going at it like horny teenagers. Among its myriad other distinctions, Between Worlds is WAY hornier than any Cage film in ages. It’s a movie with a libido as formidable as its strangeness.
Our confused anti-hero finds himself powerfully conflicted when Billie announces that she’s inhabited by the spirit of his dead wife and wants to take him on a sexed-up trip to the Pound Town so that they can visit the Bone Zone together.
Joe feels bad about having sex with his girlfriend’s daughter but he really misses her. You can tell by the way he says, “OOPS! They’re DEAD!” earlier in the film.
Also, Billie has got a smoking body, and I’m not referring to the bodies she left smoking when she burnt her house down on account of being evil. Joe ostensibly has the best of both worlds: the emotional and spiritual connection he felt with his late wife in the body of a hot 19 year old begging for sex.
Joe is a weak man so it isn’t long until he and Billie are going at it while Cage reads from a book of memories onscreen credited to Nicolas Cage.
I am not kidding. This is an actual scene in a movie that exists and that Nicolas Cage agreed to star in and that you can see if morbidly curious.
It was at this moment that I realized that Between Worlds was a very silly movie with no sense of shame. That is its most winning quality. It goes way too far and then just keeps going.
Is Between Worlds good? Is it bad? I don’t know. I’m not sure concepts like good and bad apply to a movie this peculiar.
What I do know is that Between Worlds is audacious and unique and while it is often terrible it is at least terrible in an oddly hypnotic way.
It’s not good, necessarily, but it sure is different.
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