[Film Review] Sympathy for the Devil (2023)

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, Sympathy for the Devil wouldn’t exist.

If you know me at all, you know that I love, as many people do, the work of Nic Cage. Live by the Cage, die by the Cage. So, when the opportunity to review this came up, I jumped at it. This is technically my second Cage film for this outlet – I reviewed Prisoners of the Ghostland (2021) in 2021, which is delightful if you haven’t seen it. I know Cage’s penchant for taking on weird and sometimes less-than-stellar roles just to keep himself working, so I was prepared for anything. And I certainly got… something.

Sympathy for the Devil, directed by Yuval Adler, tells the story of a man (The Driver, played by Joel Kinnaman) who is carjacked by a delirious stranger (The Passenger, played, of course, by Nic Cage). The plot here is standard – a seemingly normal man just trying to do the right thing is swept up into a circus of murder and chaos by forces out of his control, and the action all revolves around The Driver trying to get back to the hospital where his wife is giving birth. Very standard plot-things happen: getting pulled over by a cop, stopping at a diner. There is technically a twist, which I won’t spoil, but it’s signaled so heavily throughout the film that it doesn’t actually feel like much of a reveal when it happens.

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In terms of the script, the dialogue feels as though it was written with Nic Cage specifically in mind (or at least, someone doing a Nic Cage impression). The Passenger is full of zany, scenery-chewing Cage-isms that mean that at various points in the film (perhaps on purpose) you sort of forget The Driver is there. And while the script was clearly written with the third act of Vampire’s Kiss in mind, I actually feel that choosing to go over the top with much of the delivery was not a good choice for the film. These films typically rely on slow and quiet tension to really be counted as thrillers, and so the main antagonist exaggerating himself to the point of cartoon means that some of the most menacing moments fall flat. Kinnaman attempts to hold his own, but it’s nearly impossible to upstage Nic Cage on a roll.

The design choices in the film similarly work against what the plot is trying to do as a white-knuckle thriller. Perhaps in homage to the title, Nic Cage has cherry-red dyed hair and wears a matching red blazer for the entirety of the film. This very obvious Passenger-as-Satan adds to his general manic air, but also makes him very visually out of place with the rest of the film, which is all styled realistically. Rather than this working to set him apart, it seems merely jarring, like someone who shows up in a clubbing outfit to a casual backyard barbecue.  The one bit of visual differentiation in the film, a fiery conflagration at the end (to evoke the fires of Hell?), works well stylistically – the low light on the characters to emphasize the chaos of the surroundings is a nice touch.

For my final criteria, I always like to discuss something I call “the horror factor”: simply put, how close does this film meet or not meet generic criteria (flexibly interpreted) of a horror film. I knew going in that Sympathy for the Devil was not going to be pure horror, but rather its less gory cousin, the thriller. However, the film, due to all of the cartoonish elements mentioned prior, doesn’t really land as a thriller, either. Instead, it seems almost like a character study, but one that ends up saying more about the actor than the character they’re portraying. Nic Cage has displayed in recent years that he’s capable of being a far more nuanced actor (Pig is a standout here) than this role demonstrates. I almost wonder why he chose to go back to his old ways – directorial intervention? Nostalgia? Either way, I don’t think this film works on a lot of levels, including the generic.

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