Mark Reviews Movies: PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 16, 2021

Fundamentally, Prisoners of the Ghostland is a mashup of assorted genres—a Western, a samurai adventure, a post-apocalyptic tale, a ghost story, a rescue mission. The movie is also, perhaps, only that, as an unnamed anti-hero travels a world of death and cataclysm, looking for a missing woman and encountering some obstacles along the way. Meanwhile, the filmmakers don't seem to be searching for any meaning in or reason for telling this story, beyond the fact that it might be neat.

It is to some degree, or at least, it is for a bit. The screenplay by Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai relies on the creation of a recognizable but off-kilter world of familiar motifs, blended together in ways that make them uniquely strange and strangely unique. We first meet our protagonist, who calls himself "nobody" but is referred to as "Hero" (Nicolas Cage, going from stoic to shouty at random), in the act of robbing a bank, which is common enough as both a plot point and an introductory point for this character of flawed morality.

The bank itself, though, is a mostly sterile place—filled with white walls and rows of chairs and bank tellers wearing uniforms that look like pale vinyl—punctuated by a giant gumball machine and a little boy, holding a clear up filled with the rainbow-colored candy. Sion Sono, the director (a veteran of Japanese cinema, making his English-language debut), certainly possesses an eye for such striking and jarring backdrops, but if a montage of repeated shots of that candy dispenser being shattered from multiple angles is any indication, both Sono and the screenwriters are hoping that such sights will compensate for the many narrative absences in this movie.

Some time after the robbery (It's left intentionally vague for a twist that really doesn't mean much), in which Hero's partner Psycho (Nick Cassavetes) killed multiple people, Hero is in jail in a town that aesthetically recalls both a haven of the Old West and a bustling borough of feudal-era Japan. After a lot of pomp and parading, with some Kabuki-styled pageantry and Western shenanigans, Hero is summoned by the Governor (Bill Moseley) to find his missing granddaughter Bernice (Sofia Boutella), who escapes from a kind of brothel in a second prologue. If Hero can bring the young woman back to town, he'll be released from jail with a clean record.

There are a couple of catches. First, the leather outfit the Governor gifts Hero is rigged with targeted explosives—one on each arm, two at his neck, and another two connected to two points of interest on his groin area. If he attempts to hit or ravage Bernice, the corresponding explosive will detonate. If he fails to find and return Bernice within five days, all of them will explode.

That simple plot takes us through even more simplistic characterization and world-building. The crux of Hero's adventure involves a town in ruins, somewhere down a long stretch of highway. The highway is haunted, according to the locals, by a gang of ghosts, and they're stranded in the wasteland of this village as a result.

Enoch (Charles Glover), the leader of the tribe, explains that the town was the location of a massive nuclear reactor, and a spill of radioactive material in the past has made the place one of basic survival. A tour of it, as Hero is pulled through the place after an encounter with the ghosts, gives us some creepy (People decorating themselves with the pieces of mannequins), symbolic (The townsfolk keep the surviving clock from moving, out of fear of another explosion), and ultimately hollow visuals.

That's more or less the pattern of the story, which sees Hero and Bernice trying to return to town, only to be stopped by the ghosts on the highway and get into a massive street fight once they actually arrive (The staging of the climactic action is chaotic, although in a convoluted and confused way). In between the broad plot beats, Sono indulges in the scenery of these assorted places and repetitive nightmares of Hero and Bernice's pasts and fears. It's a circular kind of storytelling that keeps showing us the same things, hitting the same notes of these characters, and hinting at some deeper metaphorical purpose to this world that never actually emerges.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is so busy creating these locales—and filling them with so much business—that it seems to forget to offer an underlying reason for their existence. The result is a lot of well-decorated, meaningless nonsense.

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