Between Worlds Movie Review

Between Worlds (2018)

Rent Between Worlds on Amazon Video
Written by: Maria Pulera
Directed by: Maria Pulera
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Franka Potente, Penelope Mitchell
Rated: R
Watch the trailer

Plot
Joe meets a mother who can contact spirits. With her daughter in a coma, Joe helps the mother spiritually contact the daughter, but Joe's dead wife enters the comatose body instead.

Verdict
This is not a good movie, but it does feature an amazing performance by Nicolas Cage. That is the one, and possibly only, highlight of this movie that may be a dark comedy rather than a subpar drama. There are definitely moments where I feel like this movie is trolling.
I almost hope the humor is intentional. Every Cage scene is amusing if not hilarious, and that almost makes up for how bad this is.
It depends.

Review
The instigating event is Cage's character Joe saving a woman from a man who was choking her. Instead of appreciation, the woman is mad at him and Joe is trying to figure out why.

Nicolas Cage as truck driver Joe.

Joe is a truck driver, but looks like a low level drug dealer. Throughout the movie Cage's portrayal of Joe is comical. From the gestures to the voice, I almost wondered if Cage wasn't acting but legitimately believed what was happening is real. It really is a terrific Cage performance.

Joe and Julie.

The plot makes so little sense there is no reason to even question it. Joe teams up with Julie to see her daughter and it's just strange they befriend each other so quickly. Julie agrees to Joe driving her to see her comatose daughter despite him drinking from a flash every few minutes. I have to imagine that should have been a question for her.

There's a supernatural bent to this with some body possession, and nothing anyone does makes a lot of sense. The plot's rather simple if a bit uneventful, mother and daughter are after the same man, but the daughter isn't really the daughter anymore. Normally if that happens the person possessed would try to prove who they are or who they aren't, not the character in this movie. She just lets it ride.

I have to imagine the script was loose and improvisation was encouraged. How else would we get this scene?

The crowning moment of this movie is a scene that is cutting between a dual sex scene with Joe in both of them. He is reading aloud from a book titled "Memories of Nicolas Cage." At this moment I wondered if this entire movie was a big joke. It might be. This is after an earlier sex scene where Joe wanted to act out The Exorcist.

The possessed daughter kept stating she doesn't do well alone. This leads to a twist, but if you care about the plot you're watching this for the wrong reasons. This is the Cage show.

I have to point out some terrible CGI that made me wonder if a character was supposed to be on fire and burning or whether this was something else supernatural. Turns out it was just bad CGI.

The conclusion to the movie is a bit of a mess, though that shouldn't be a surprise. It's completely unsatisfying. This does tack on a flashback scene that is completely inexplicable. It adds nothing to the movie, and at this point of the movie seems like an errant section of video.

The more i think about this movie, the more I believe the humor is intentional. There's not way you have a sex scene with Nicolas Cage playing a character who is reading a Nicolas Cage book during sex. I still don't know if this movie is good or bad, but it just might be worth a watch.