THESE DAYS, EVERY new Nicolas Cage film comes with a certain weight of expectation: he’s going to do something crazy! Again! Even so, Cage himself insisted — speaking at the Macao International Film Festival in 2018 — that Prisoners Of The Ghostland ups the ante. “It might be the wildest movie I’ve ever made, he explained. “And that’s saying something. I wear a skintight black leather jumpsuit with grenades attached to different body parts, and if I don’t rescue the governor’s daughter from this state line where they’re all ghosts… they’re gonna blow me up. It’s way out there.”
How did Nicolas Cage’s infamously singular mind find something way out there, even for him? The answer: a similarly singular mind in Sion Sono. Having made his name in Japan with provocative ultraviolent fare like Suicide Club (a gruesome horror about a wave of mass suicides) and Love Exposure (a four-hour epic featuring full erections, perverted Catholics, and genital gore), the subversive Japanese director makes his English-language debut here. Clearly, with Cage, it was a meeting of minds.