The Wicker Man is a 2006 horror film written and directed by Neil LaBute, a remake of Robin Hardy's genuinely excellent 1973 British folk-horror classic. It stars Nicolas Cage as Edward Malus, a police officer who travels to the remote, private island of Summersisle to search for a missing girl, only to discover the community is a matriarchal pagan society with plans of its own. I went into this knowing it only by reputation, specifically the "not the bees" meme that has floated around the internet for years, and I assumed that reputation had been inflated for comedic effect. Having now watched the entire thing, I can confirm the reputation was, if anything, underselling it.

Let me set the stage properly, because the pedigree here makes the result so much funnier. Neil LaBute is a respected, acclaimed dramatist, known for sharp, acerbic character pieces like In the Company of Men. Nicolas Cage is a legitimate Academy Award winner. The source material is one of the most quietly unsettling horror films ever made. Every ingredient for something good was on the table, and what emerged instead is one of the most spectacular misfires of its era, a film so misjudged it has since been reclaimed as a "so bad it's good" cult classic in the company of The Room and Batman & Robin.The performance is where I have to begin, because it defies normal description.

There is a moment, and if you've seen the film you know exactly the one, where Cage's voice shifts into a warbly, panicked, high-pitched wobble that, to my ear, is a dead ringer for the little fish from Spongebob. Once I noticed it, I could not stop noticing it, and whatever fragile grip the film had on me was gone. Cage spends the runtime lurching between blank confusion and sudden, operatic hysteria, and the effect is less "haunted investigator" and more "man being genuinely tormented by a script he cannot escape."Then there is the violence, which is the stuff of legend. Faced with a community of women who won't cooperate, Malus's solution is, repeatedly, to hit them.

He punches one woman unconscious. He takes a running kick and launches another into a wall. And in the film's undisputed crowning moment, he dons a full bear costume and punches a woman square in the face while attempting to reach the missing girl. I want to stress that this is an Academy Award winner, in a bear suit, throwing haymakers. He also, at one point, threatens a woman at gunpoint to steal her bicycle. It is difficult to overstate how thoroughly the film expects you to remain on this man's side throughout all of this.And then comes the ending, the great gotcha the whole thing has been building toward. It is revealed that the entire scenario was an elaborate trap. Years earlier, the islanders sent one of their own to seduce Malus and bear his child, and that missing girl, Rowan, is in fact his own daughter.