In short: Sympathy for the Devil (2023)

A man we’ll only ever really know as The Driver (Joel Kinnaman) is just on his way to the hospital where his wife is in heavy labour. He’s rather nervous, for a first birth some years ago did go sadly. Unexpectedly, the Driver is carjacked by a guy we’ll just call The Passenger (Nicolas Cage). The Passenger is a bit of a ranting, raving maniac, supposedly only threatening the Driver with death and violence to get a ride from him, but it quickly becomes clear that he hasn’t chosen his victim randomly. The Passenger seems to test and prod the Driver, searching for certain reactions whose nature will become clear during the course of the movie.

Eventually, during a climactic scene in a diner, all else will become clear as well.

How much you’ll like, or even just tolerate, Yuval Adler’s Sympathy for the Devil will very much depend on your love or tolerance for Nicolas Cage in his all-out mode, when neck muscles tense, eyes bug, and expressions become barely human contortions, while dialogue spews and spits forth as by a man possessed by something nasty. Me, I could watch doing Cage this sort of thing for hours. Over the years, Cage’s very particular sense for being larger than life has grown to mean a lot to me, and he’s delivering that in spades here.

He’s not doing it pointlessly or without purpose, though, and one of Sympathy’s specific joys for me is to watch his interplay with Kinnaman’s demonstrative normalcy, what it suggests about the characters and what it actually means once the plot has run its course. I really can’t overstate how important Kinnaman’s performance here is, his ability to not get drowned out by what Cage does, despite having to use an acting approach that’s the exact opposite for the film to make sense.

Adler’s direction is also very strong indeed, not just because I’m a sucker for prettily shot neon night ride movies (though I am), but because he actually copes with Cage’s performance and makes use of it for the film, emphasising or decreasing the loudness of Cage in the appropriate moments. Not an easy task, I would assume. He’s also rather great at creating a classic suspense scene. when needed. The diner climax is as good as this sort of thing gets, edited to a perfect rhythm and breathless in its sense of threat, violence, and its feel of transgression.

So, for anyone who doesn’t actively hate Cage (and really, are you sure you’re at the right place here?), this might turn out to be a fantastic thriller.