Pris­on­ers of the Ghostland

In 2016 The Hol­ly­wood Reporter dubbed Sion Sono ​“the most sub­ver­sive film­mak­er work­ing in Japan­ese cin­e­ma today”. Unpre­dictable, eclec­tic and irrev­er­ent, it was per­haps only a mat­ter of time before he found his way to kin­dred spir­it Nico­las Cage, who has achieved a sim­i­lar sort of cult sta­tus with audi­ences for his love of plots that sound like they were scrib­bled down by some­one high on bath salts.

The result of their col­lab­o­ra­tion is Sono’s first Eng­lish-lan­guage film, Pris­on­ers of the Ghost­land, which com­bines samu­rai and west­ern iconog­ra­phy to cre­ate a post-apoc­a­lyp­tic tale of redemp­tion and upris­ing. The epony­mous Hero (Nico­las Cage) is a ruth­less bank rob­ber, sprung from the jail­house by The Gov­er­nor (Bill Mose­ley), who hires him to retrieve his miss­ing ​“niece” Ber­nice (Sofia Boutel­la) from the radioac­tive ​‘Ghost­land’ beyond the safe­ty of the town limits.

The bul­lets fly and swords clash as East meets West in a sort of Rashomon-Dirty Har­ry-Mad Max bat­tle royale. Cage deliv­ers anoth­er moody lone ranger belea­guered by vio­lence while Moseley’s vil­lain (dressed all in white, resem­bling Colonel Sanders) chews the scenery with aplomb.

Although Aaron Hendry and Reza Sixo Safai’s script could use a lit­tle finess­ing, Sono brings it to life with his usu­al flare, sewing togeth­er a strange won­der­land pop­u­lat­ed by super­f­reaks, zom­bies and psy­chos. While purists might grum­ble that Pris­on­ers of the Ghost­land lacks the bold­ness of Sono’s pre­vi­ous work, it is a fine intro­duc­tion to the direc­tor for any­one who hasn’t encoun­tered him before.