Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

The joke in Willy’s Wonderland is partly a matter of priorities. Faced with murderous animatronic mascots, Nicolas Cage’s janitor still has a building to clean. Disaster keeps arriving as an interruption to the job.

Kevin Lewis’s film places Cage inside a derelict family entertainment venue and lets the collision do much of the work. The setting promises childhood fun, but everything about it has curdled: the costumes, the surfaces, the insistence that the customer should be having a good time.

Keep to the schedule

Cage makes routine into a form of resistance. His silence leaves the other characters to supply explanations while he concentrates on the task in front of him. The physical certainty of the performance is funny because the situation appears to require panic.

The cleaning matters to the rhythm. Without it, the film would be a succession of attacks. Returning to work resets the joke and lets the next burst of violence arrive against an absurdly stable routine.

One idea, played hard

There are limits to the approach. The premise is more distinctive than the surrounding exposition, and the film is at its strongest when it trusts the simple spectacle of Cage confronting another problem with the same expression.

Still, the work-ethic reading is hard to resist. The janitor behaves as though surviving the night and finishing the shift belong on the same list. The building can be appalling; the job can still be done properly.

It is a narrow, ridiculous idea, performed with enough conviction to make its repetition pleasurable. A grimy room, a mascot with bad intentions and a man determined to get back to work: sometimes a horror comedy has all the machinery it needs.