Nicolas Cage is an actor known for taking risks. Love him or hate him, the man’s approach to acting is undeniably his own, and when he’s deployed in films that take an equally idiosyncratic and unpredictable approach, the results are almost always interesting, if not always successful.
2021’s Prisoners of the Ghostland, starring Cage as “Hero,” is both. A bold mix of tones, genres, and storytelling devices, the movie bashes its way through a post-apocalyptic plot like Fury Road re-told by someone who saw it on mushrooms and fell asleep halfway through, while also unwittingly listening to an original cast recording of Madame Butterfly the whole time.
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Genre Mash-Up
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Since at least the days of The Seven Samurai, movies has explored the fascinating affinity between Feudal Japan and the American Wild West, at least as far as each are presented on film. That said, it’s hard to think of a more gleefully bizarre mash-up of the two genres than Prisoners of the Ghostland.
Indeed, while the roots of Prisoners of the Ghostland may go back to samurai movies from the likes of Masaki Kobayashi and Akira Kurasawa, and Westerns from directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks, the movie’s most direct influences are the acid westerns of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Luc Moullet, George Englund, and others.
A Fever Dream of a Movie
Prisoners of the Ghostland is set in a Japanese wasteland, the result of a fiery crash between a prison bus and a shipment of nuclear waste that somehow initiated a nuclear explosion and widespread fires. At least, this seems to be the case, based on exposition given by a Greek chorus of Ghostland-dwellers, complete with hand-drawn illustrations. There’s no real reason to doubt the truth of this story, except that the information comes inside a dream that Cage’s character, Hero, is having.
For Prisoners of the Ghostland, this is unimportant. The distinction between dreams and reality is flexible at most, and mostly seemingly irrelevant. Cage’s character doesn’t even properly sleep when he has these dreams. They arise, instead, as he reels in pain from one of the several small explosives sewn into his jumpsuit detonating because he’s had impure thoughts.
The sentence above is not a plot summary for Prisoners of the Ghostland, but should give you a good idea what kind of movie it is. Also, anyone familiar with director Sion Sono’s absurdist, nihilistic films from Japan (Suicide Club, Cold Fish) probably has some idea of what they’re getting themselves into.
What the Heck is Prisoners of the Ghostland?
It’s the kind of movie where a big, bombastic, bizarre performance from Cage in full-on Elvis-impersonating, open-throated-shouting, scenery-chewing mode feels perfectly at home.
Elements of the film (cars, bicycles, explosive jumpsuit technology) suggest that it takes place in the near future. The sets, though, are straight out of a low-budget Hollywood Western and most of the men dress and act like movie cowboys, or at least a particular idea of what movie cowboys might be like in the fever dream landscape of the rest of the movie. The women, meanwhile, are done up as geishas, and the villain’s main henchman is a samurai of sorts named Yasujiro, played with stoic understatement by Tak Sakaguchi in a subplot that seems lifted directly from a much more somber and serious movie.
The film’s antagonist, Bill Moseley’s drawling, sinister Governor, becomes associated with the concept of Time itself by the end of the movie. Regardless of the success of Hero, the movie has already built itself on the premise that past, present, and future are held apart only by mutual consent, and could be blended as easily as languages, genres, and styles by the right artist.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
In 2018 Cage told IndieWire that Prisoners of the Ghostland “might be the wildest movie I’ve ever made,” which, given his filmography, is really saying something. Cage himself provides neither his best nor wildest performance in the film, though the bar for each of those things is set remarkably high.
As a criminal haunted by a bank robbery gone wrong, Cage is bearded, brooding, and taciturn. He manages to come across as a good man led astray by misfortune, almost a variation on his character in Con Air, though the movie approaches this characterization by alternating between completely ignoring it and beating the audience over the head with it.
Cage matches this with a performance that is by turns stoic, goofy, and bellowing in pain. His character is either haunted or possibly even aided by the ghosts of the victims of his violent crimes. Perhaps, just as Prisoners of the Ghostland manages to mix past and future, east and west, somber and goofy, it’s both.
In the End
Ultimately, Prisoners of the Ghostland is a fascinating, widely overlooked movie. Nicolas Cage doesn’t break any new ground in his performance here, but he does deliver the kind of exuberant, expressionist performance that many fans have come to expect from him in a film that’s overflowing with more ideas than it’s capable of executing. It’s the kind of fun, boisterous movie that can be hard to come by lately, and a must-watch for anyone looking for a break from the norm.
