The Surfer, the newest psychological thriller starring Nicolas Cage, is sun-drenched, disorientating, propulsive, and intriguingly bizarre.
For every Nicolas Cage devotee, you must keep your expectations squarely in check.
While the Oscar winner is among our greatest working actors, as well as our most prolific and quotable, Cage is also famous for making a lot of subpar movies. Many of which don’t even grace the silver screen. Instead, they linger in the sorry lands of VOD hell. For as many times as he hits it big with Mandy, Pig, or Joe, there are twice (sometimes triple) as many misfires, several of which with nearly interchangeable titles: Vengeance, Seeking Justice, A Score to Settle, you get the idea. When you dedicate yourself to every Cage flick, you are in for a world of hurt. But sometimes there’s sweet relief when you find a good or even decent one. Thankfully, The Surfer, his latest, is a pretty good Cage film.
The newest from director Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium) plays like The Swimmer in Ozploitation mode, particularly paying tribute to Wake in Fright. It’s gorgeous, engagingly methodical, and frequently unsettling. For Cage fans like myself, it’s also a film that knows how to make good use of his familiar brand of mania. Even if it’s overcooked in terms of its well-heated Australian beach location, and its slightly overlong and ultimately ridiculous premise, it’s a commendable effort made with careful care, fine craft, and with blistering suspense.
The (former) Family Man.
The Surfer centers around a man we only know as, fittingly, The Surfer (Cage), an American businessman who returns to his Australian hometown with a burning desire to buy his family’s beachside home. One day, when he tries to take his teenage boy (Finn Little) out on the waves on the waters he once surfed as a kid, The Surfer and his son suffer harassment from a group of locals who claim that this beautiful beach is only for them, and that “outsiders” are not welcome there.
Led by the enigmatic and charismatic guru leader, Scally (a fantastically slimy Julian McMahon), The Surfer is bullied off the beach, one that he once frequented in his youth, but he’s not going to be deterred. He returns not long after with bullish determination and a persistent personality making numerous calls in his fancy car, trying desperately to purchase the house before a quickly approaching Christmas. And in that process, his pig-headedness pushes The Surfer to continue trying to outwit and overtake the beach cult, which has larger tentacles around the waterside community than he thought. As he continues his dogged pursuit, The Surfer keeps his overheated optimism, causing him to lose everything, the least of which his waning sanity, in a hyper-masculine urge to reunite with these lost shores.
Turfer wars.
At a time when “Alpha Male” personalities like Andrew Tate exceed parody in their dogmatic threshold on a certain approval-seeking portion of the male population, there is something oddly timely and pertinent to The Surfer and its exploration of this middle-aged loser. With no functioning family life and a general unhappiness about his lot in life, he goes to extraordinary lengths to find toxic approval from these oppressive blowhards who continuously and feverishly patronize the sands of his lost youth. While The Surfer dabbles in some surrealistic qualities, it’s easy to see what Cage (also a producer here) and Finnegan find fascinating in Thomas Martin’s loopy, logic-straining script.
The result is a movie that, in its one central location, can feel overlong and repetitive, even at its agreeable 100-minute length. But The Surfer keeps your investment in its cunning and culturally relevant thematic exploration. That’s not to say that these ideas aren’t getting exploration or better elsewhere, but there is a fitting intrigue that comes from this character’s inscrutable desire to fit in with these loony locals. Cage sucks you into the movie’s engagingly weird small-scale rhythm, because he’s so good at capturing that wide-eyed delirium even when his performance ventures into expected bits of improv and overacting.
In fact, you’re more receptive here because it feels earned and validated this time. Finnegan keeps a tight hold on the movie’s oddball vibe, captured quite effectively with sharp sound design and eye-catching bits of color saturation that make The Surfer simmer and pop, especially if you venture out to see it on the big screen. He knows how to wring out disorientating dread from even fairly innocuous locations like a small beach parking lot that is all righteously unhinged when it comes time for our titular tidal-waver to snap. Ultimately, that’s all you can really hope for in a premise-heavy character piece from late-period Cage.
The bottom line.
Cage is in an intriguingly explorative period of his career, using a lot of his newest ventures as a star and producer to push himself into expectedly deranged, debauched places with purpose and deviousness. The Surfer won’t be stand at the top in the laurels of Cagedom when comparing to some recent triumphs and some all-time classics. At times the waves can seem mild or a bit uneven with misfires like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Renfield, and The Retirement Plan, which makes it easy to forget about a couple of his recent hits such as Longlegs and Dream Scenario. That’s why it’s refreshing when you can catch even a fairly modest one that you can ride smoothly out to sandy shore. The Surfer is nowhere near a wipeout.
The Surfer is now playing in theaters everywhere. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Stan/Madman Films. Read more reviews by Will Ashton here.
REVIEW RATING
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The Surfer - 6/10
6/10
