‘Sympathy For The Devil’: Fantasia Review

Dir: Yuval Adler. US. 2023. 90mins

Nicolas Cage may play a passenger in Sympathy For The Devil, but he is clearly in the driver’s seat of this B-movie thriller about an innocent man trying to get to his very pregnant wife and the deranged criminal who holds him hostage at gunpoint, forcing him to go off-course. The Oscar-winner’s over-the-top performance is equal parts predictable and weirdly riveting, the actor indulging his more excessive (and occasionally tedious) tendencies while delivering a gripping portrait of uncut menace. Director Yuval Adler taps into the lean story’s Collateral-like intrigue but, outside of Cage’s hair-trigger antics, there is not much surprise here — especially when the filmmaker unveils a twist most will see coming down the road.

Cage’s over-the-top performance is equal parts predictable and weirdly riveting

Opening in the US on July 28 and screening as part of Fantasia Festival, Sympathy For The Devil will cater to Cage fans who will relish it when when he busts loose, turning his character into a symphony of off-kilter outbursts, odd quirks and dark wit. He’s paired with Joel Kinnaman as the helpless everyman, and the film’s nocturnal edginess and accessible premise should please genre audiences.

When we meet David (Kinnaman), he is already stressed out as he frantically drives to the hospital where his wife is about to give birth. (She lost a previous child during labour, which only adds to the couple’s anxiety.) But his night becomes even more fraught when, after pulling into the emergency room parking lot, a stranger (Cage) gets in the backseat, puts a gun in David’s face and orders him to drive. Never revealing his name, the stranger explains that David must take him to a secret location — and that if David does everything he says, perhaps he will stay alive.

Not unlike the setup of Collateral, the 2004 Michael Mann film starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx, Adler’s fourth feature is a two-hander in which an expert killer and an ordinary joe share one intense night. Sympathy For The Devil begins in Las Vegas, with cinematographer Steven Holleran capturing the city’s neon glitz, before quickly shifting to the city’s desert outskirts, where lonely gas stations and seedy diners dot the otherwise ghostly landscape. 

As soon as the stranger jumps into David’s car, we know this man is to be feared. With his hair dyed magenta and sporting a loud red sportcoat, Cage might as well be the titular demon – and the stranger certainly savours tormenting David, whose meagre protests fall on deaf ears. As we will soon learn, this armed passenger has not picked David at random, and much of the film’s suspense stems from discovering why he specifically wants David to drive him. Kinnaman plays David as meek and harried, desperate to reason with a criminal who snidely mocks his attempts at provoking sympathy. (In one of Cage’s many impassioned soliloquies, the stranger berates David for assuming that talking compassionately about his family will work on someone like him.)

With the exception of stripped-down dramas such as Pig, Cage has explored a maximalist acting style that favours fireworks over nuance in recent years – and Sympathy For The Devil demonstrates both the pros and cons of his technique. It is now practically typecasting for Cage to portray such a devilish figure, and the bug-eyed extremes of his performance fluctuate between being amusing, disturbing and exhausting.

Other than Cage, the film operates in a grungy, realistic register, so his hijacking of proceedings is both distracting and riveting as he takes Luke Paradise’s script for a wild ride. But there is no questioning that Cage’s theatrics can be arresting, slyly commenting on the story’s conventionality while simultaneously crafting a terrifying character whose certainty that his and David’s destinies are linked gives the film a constant undercurrent of dread.

Key to that dynamic is Kinnaman, who previously worked with Adler on 2020’s The Secrets We Keep, and the actor effortlessly creates empathy for this ordinary man trapped in terrible circumstances. David’s attempts at outsmarting the stranger lead to some modestly effective low-budget action sequences. But whether it is the mystery behind why this unnamed passenger has kidnapped David or the eventual resolution of their faceoff, Sympathy For The Devil works in familiar narrative terrain, including a late plot reveal that’s not especially surprising. David wants to escape this madman, but it’s Cage who keeps us on board.