Cage Match: Between Worlds (2018)

“Between Worlds” is a gloriously unhinged supernatural mess that’s hilariously awful; it’s also catnip for cuckoo-Cage devotees.

TL;DR: Not so much a movie as a psychotic fever dream about grief, ghosts, and really bad sex. But if you worship at the altar of Cage Chaos, it’s pure sacrilege to skip this one.

IN THIS CORNER: KELLY MINTZER

The Lowdown 

Nicolas Cage changes how you view the world. I know that sounds absurd and maybe even extreme, but I have now watched way too many of his movies, and I can tell you that it’s made me re-evaluate things that I thought were relatively straightforward.

For instance, bad movies are inherently bad, and good movies are inherently good. Seems self-evident, right? Except with Nicolas Cage movies, there are bad-bad ones and then there are good-bad ones and then there are the bad-bad ones that somehow are still kind of great.

Today, we are talking about one such movie. 

Ladies and gentlemen, girls and theys, I’d never heard of Between Worlds before Steph delivered this astonishing, glorious turd of a movie to me on a silver platter. And I have to tell you, it is something special. A highly un-erotic erotic thriller with wooden acting, incredibly uncomfortable sex scenes, a nonsense plot, and a BANANAS soundtrack?

It’s Twin Peaks’ idiot child, and I weirdly couldn’t get enough.

Nic Cage plays a long-haul trucker who is, objectively, bad at his job. He’s lost his wife and child in tragic circumstances (not uncommon for Cage characters) and comes across a woman getting strangled in a bathroom. He “saves” her (believe it or not, those quotation marks are earned) only to find her ungrateful. You see, she has the ability to walk between worlds (get it? It’s the name of the movie!) and she is trying to find her daughter, who is in a coma, to bring her back to life.

Ok. So here’s the crazy thing. This woman’s ability to get herself strangled into communion with the dead and semi-dead is NOT actually that major of a plot point. It’s there, but it’s not really THAT important. 

Of course, she and Nic Cage fuck, in one of the most hilariously uncomfortable sex scenes I’ve seen until the next hilariously uncomfortable sex scene in this movie. In a moment of inspired, terrible editing, the psychic-ish lady takes her bra off, Nic Cage unceremoniously honks her boobs, and in the next second her bra is back on.

I do not blame this actress for wanting a bra between her and Nic Cage for as much of the scene as possible; I find Moonstruck-era Cage very attractive, but this guy… not so much. 

And then shit gets straight silly. Cage’s needy dead wife has taken over the body of his new lover. A woman who looks AGGRESSIVELY young, which is one of the parts of this movie that gave me the jibbilies. Of course, inevitably, she and Nic Cage fuck, and she looks like she could easily be his daughter.

All of this happens with a lounge music soundtrack, and none of it is good or makes sense. You could try to argue that this is an attempt at Twin Peaks weirdness, and maybe you’d be right. You’d be equally right if you called it a bad attempt and an overall failure. It’s so bad! And it’s SO weirdly watchable.

The older actress is confusingly bad. I read her wiki page, and it seems like she has some legit credits and acclaim behind her, but she is awful in this movie. There were some intentional laughs that genuinely worked. The daughter’s goofy stoner friends were pretty charming and made me chuckle a couple of times. But the whole plot is rushed and underdeveloped.

The idea that a self-sufficient, trucker single mom would invite a total rando to move in with her and her beloved daughter after a cumulative 48 hours together is bananas.

The line “A man’s not a man without a truck” is bonkers. Give Nic Cage the Oscar for delivering it.

The Cage Factor: 

I am SO tempted to call this a Cage Fighter, because this is Nic Cage giving a Tommy Wiseau performance. It’s ALL over the place; it’s big, it’s stupid, it’s absolutely impossible to look away from. In some ways, this is the most he’s ever been treated like a sex object, and ALSO some of the worst he’s looked. Also, after watching this movie, I’m not convinced he’s ever had sex with a woman.

So I really want to call this a Cage Fighter because for ME it is. But I can’t in good conscience, because not everyone revels in weirdness the way I do. This is Cautious Cage. It’s probably not for you. But IF you are one of the us-es it’s for, you’re going to have a goddamn blast with this one.

AND IN THIS CORNER: STEPHANIE MALONE

The Lowdown 

One of the worst things a Nicolas Cage movie can be is boring. Like, how the hell do you cast Nicolas Cage—a man capable of both Oscar-worthy emotional depth and full-blown, batshit lunacy—and then give us something tepid? We’ve endured plenty of sleepy Cage performances in dull movies (see Pay the Ghost and a long list of others we’ve valiantly suffered through). But sometimes, our man ends up in an objectively awful film and, through the sheer gravitational force of his weird charisma, turns it into an accidental masterpiece.

Enter Between Worlds (2018), a supernatural thriller that got a mixed-to-negative reception and has since taken its rightful place in the pantheon of Cage insanity… nestled somewhere between The Wicker Man and Deadfall.

One of my favorite things about this Cage Match series is the ongoing text exchanges with my co-conspirator, Kelly. She often messages me in disbelief after each new entry, but this time, her reaction was a spiritual experience. Knowing I’m one of those people who find Cage deeply sexy, she texted:

“After watching Between Worlds, I’m convinced Nicolas Cage has never had sex in his life.”

Dead.

And here’s the thing: she’s not wrong. Prepare yourself for some of the most painfully awkward, aggressively unsexy consensual sex scenes ever committed to film. They’re so spectacularly cringe that I physically winced more than once, recoiling in secondhand embarrassment.

Do I still find Cage sexy? Hell yes, I do. But if I weren’t already a card-carrying member of the Church of Cage, this film might have made me question the sanity of anyone who finds him seductive.

If you’re not a Cage diehard, this one’s a slog. It takes a painfully long time to get to the real good stuff. But once it does, the movie unravels in the most spectacular way imaginable. It’s side-splitting entertainment that refuses to make a single logical decision.

It looks like a bad made-for-TV movie, and it feels utterly bonkers that something like this ever got greenlit. But thank the cinematic gods for Nicolas Cage. He once again knows exactly what kind of film he’s in and gleefully rides it straight off the rails.

There are moments that make you wonder if Cage himself had a hand in crafting them because they’re so quintessentially batshit Cagey that no other explanation makes sense.

Take, for instance, the infamous “sexorcism” scene where Cage’s character Joe asks his lover to channel Linda Blair’s Regan from The Exorcist while she rides him. You think you know how weird that sounds? You don’t.

The plot itself is pure uncut madness. Cage plays Joe, a grieving truck driver haunted by the deaths of his wife and young daughter in a fire. He meets Julie (Franka Potente), a woman who can communicate with the dead by being choked to near-death—a sentence I cannot believe I just wrote—and they work together to help her comatose daughter, Billie (Penelope Mitchell).

It’s a mess. An incoherent, tonally confused, narratively unmoored mess. The film gestures toward big ideas about reincarnation, grief, and redemption, but it never lands any of them. Every emotional beat is drowned out by awkward absurdity and misplaced humor. Some of the dialogue is so unhinged that it becomes instantly quotable.

And yet… You can’t look away. Because when this movie finally hits its stride, it becomes pure, chaotic magic.

There’s literally a scene where Cage’s character has sex while reading aloud from a book called Memories by Nicolas Cage. His partner—who, by the way, is an eighteen-year-old hottie possessed by his dead wife’s spirit—begs him to “keep reading” as it pushes all her tingly buttons.

Let me leave you with this…

Between Worlds was written and directed by a woman, Maria Pulera. That feels almost shocking given how much of this plays like a cis male fantasy that occasionally tips into softcore exploitation. The film is particularly male-gazey in its treatment of Mitchell, who spends most of the runtime strutting around half-naked and aggressively pursuing Cage’s character.

Pulera cites David Lynch as a key influence, and sure, you can see the fingerprints. But this isn’t Twin Peaks. It’s not surreal art; it’s more like if Twin Peaks was rewritten by someone who watched Wild at Heart during a fever-induced hallucination and said, “Yeah, but what if it was hornier, weirder, and WAY worse?”

Still, despite all its wrongness, Between Worlds is wrong in all the right ways… for the right audience.

The Cage Factor:

Say what you will about this movie — and there’s plenty to say — but Cage is fully, gloriously in it.

He’s the one person who truly gets what kind of deranged melodrama he’s in and commits to it with gusto. His performance swings between raw grief and manic absurdity, often in the same breath. He’s not phoning this in; he’s calling collect from another dimension.

His choices (the strange vocal inflections, the odd pauses, the moments of unhinged intensity) are what elevate this film from trash to treasure. He’s the alchemist turning cinematic garbage into Cage Gold.

He might be awkward, horny, and emotionally unstable here, but he’s never boring. And that, my friends, is the truest form of Cage artistry.

If you’ve been faithfully following this column, consider Between Worlds required viewing. If you just stumbled in here as a normal cinephile wondering whether it’s worth watching, I can’t, in good conscience, recommend it without adding a strong suggestion that you don’t watch it sober.

It’s so bad it’s brilliant. So weird it’s wonderful.

PS – I was thinking about how the hell I would rate this bonkers brilliance. Below is my best attempt, so you can better assess if you dare to enter this wild World. 

Film Quality: ★☆☆☆☆
As a movie, this is a catastrophe. The pacing drags, the dialogue is laughable, the plot makes zero sense, and the tone is so uneven it feels like five different movies competing for dominance. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a truck jackknifed across a supernatural highway.

Cage Performance: ★★★★☆
But oh, Cage. Our beautiful madman. He’s the reason to watch this. It’s a masterclass in instinct-driven chaos. He leans into the absurdity with gleeful abandon. This is pure Cage alchemy… taking garbage and spinning it into gold-plated insanity.

Entertainment Value: ★★★★☆
Once it stops pretending to be serious, it’s a blast. You can’t watch this without laughing, wincing, and occasionally gasping, “What the actual hell?” It’s cinematic junk food — greasy, bad for you, but impossible to stop eating.

Rewatchability (Sober): ★☆☆☆☆
Rewatchability (With Friends and Drinks): ★★★★★

Final Verdict:

3.5 out of 5 overall (for Cage superfans) / 1 out of 5 (for normal humans)