prisoners of the ghostland

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‘Boldly Insane’ PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND Releasing In Australia Next Month!

Following on from the excellent MANDY (2018) and COLOUR OUT OF SPACE (2019), Nic Cage appears in another avante-garde offering called ‘PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND’ (2021). Cage stars as a condemned man recruited by a wealthy stranger to locate and rescue his daughter imprisoned by some bizarre cult like group. Though a simplistic premise, the movie itself is anything but one note and even the two-minute trailer evokes two adjectives: boldly insane.Whether real or imagined, this trailer immediately reminded me of the bizarre ‘EL TOPO’ (1970) directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Drawing from symbolism from both East and West, the characterisations in ‘PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND’ (2021) unashamedly wear its influences on its sleeve; adapting cowboys in westerns, sword fighters from samurai films and a clear post-apocalyptic setting – again boasting the premise that, anything goes.

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PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND Review: Trapped in The Subjectiveness Of Art

In a 2016 documentary about his life and creative process, there is a scene where filmmaker Sion Sono shows a barely completed painting, that he had been working on for months, to the crew filming him and asks dispassionately if they think it’s good art or not. The off-camera interviewer, clearly confused by the sudden and direct question sputters out that he doesn’t know. Sono sharply responds that it doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad and that it only matters if it expresses emotion. He then chucks the large canvas across the room with as much care as one throws a soiled tissue into the trash. This peculiar moment reveals a lot about how Sono views his work and it’s all I could think about after I watched his latest directorial effort, the post-apocalyptic “East meets West” mashup, PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND.

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Director Of The Ghostland: A Conversation With Visionary Filmmaker Sion Sono

The trailer for his latest film, PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND, doesn’t use the tag of “A Sion Sono Film” or even a simple “directed by” note to introduce the acclaimed filmmaker to American audiences. It instead goes for the attention-grabbing phrase “[from] the warped mind of Sion Sono.” Marketing and cheeky hyperbole aside, no one working in film today has as unique of a voice as the fifty-nine-year-old Japanese auteur.

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Nicolas Cage’s PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND Sets Sono Sion’s English Debut

It’s pretty much Nicolas Cage’s world and were all just living in it.

Indeed, that makea three headlines this week for the upcoming 211 star whose latest attachment comes by way of Japanese auteur Sono Sion’s new post-apcolyptic actioner, Prisoners Of The Ghostland, which XYZ Films has included in its sales raft at Cannes. News comes just a day following Cage’s attachment to Millenium’s forthcoming detective noir thriller, Kill Chain.

Sono, the acclaimed helmer of such favorites as Love Exposure, Tokyo Tribe and Why Don’t You Play In Hell will make his English language debut from a script by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai. As Patrick Hipes at Deadline reports, Prisoners Of The Ghostland sees Cage in the role of notorious criminal Hero, who is sent to rescue an abducted girl who has disappeared into a dark supernatural universe. They must break the evil curse that binds them and escape the mysterious revenants that rule the Ghostland, an East-meets-West vortex of beauty and violence.

Safai is producing via his Black Light District Entertainment next to Laura Rister of Untitled Entertainment, Eleven Arts’ own Ko Mori, and Nate Bolotin of XYZ Films.

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