He meets Julie (Potente), a spiritually gifted woman who enlists Joe in a desperate effort to find the lost soul of her comatose daughter, Billie (Mitchell).
But the spirit of Joe's dead wife Mary proves stronger, possessing the young woman's body while intending to settle her unfinished business with the living.
Joe – whose wife and daughter tragically died – takes Julie to the hospital to witness Billie go into cardiac arrest.
Joe is quick to believe her and starts to engage in frisky activities with her, rushing to cover up their exploits when Julie returns home.
Julie is suspicious of Joe's and Billie's behavior and speaks to a nurse from the hospital who is knowledgeable about the logistics of the spirit world.
[4][5] According to director Maria Pulera, she initially wrote the film as a standard thriller, but later made it "a much more surreal drama in the vein of David Lynch".
The site's critical consensus reads, "While definitely in line with some of Nicolas Cage's stranger efforts, Between Worlds is too silly and messy to call it good, even in a weird way.
Like Twin Peaks, the film features other realms or spirit worlds, dreamlike sequences, aspects of grotesque comedy, a score reminiscent of that of Twin Peaks (which was partly composed by long-time Lynch composer Angelo Badalamenti[11]) and a seductive but fragile teenage girl at the heart of the plot.
Between Worlds also uses experimental camera angles and editing techniques as well as aspects of meta-fiction, for example breaking the fourth wall in a scene in which Joe reads from a book titled “Memories by Nicolas Cage.” The character of Joe also seems to allude to a range of previous roles played by Cage, including Alabama native Cameron Poe from Con Air, snakeskin leather aficionado Sailor Ripley from Lynch's Wild at Heart and chain-smoking Johnny Blaze from Ghost Rider, thus pointing to the larger Nicolas Cage movie metaverse.
Central themes include the idea of the afterlife, grief, trauma, parent-child relationships, feminist psychoanalytic theory, metaphysics, epistemology, shamanism and the decline of the American working class under contemporary neoliberalism.