‘The Surfer’ movie review: Nicolas Cage gets burned in Lorcan Finnegan’s psychotic beach thriller
Just in time for summer, a new movie starring Nicolas Cage is here to remind us that the sun is our enemy and those peace-loving hang-loose-ing surfers might actually be incels. Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer makes Point Break look like that animated penguin movie Surf’s Up. It’s nasty, relentless, and often incoherent, but at an hour and 40 minutes, it never outstays its welcome.
Cage plays the titular surfer, an American returning to his childhood haunts in Australia, where he hopes to purchase the beachfront home he grew up in. When we first see him, he’s wearing a tailored suit, a fancy watch, and sunglasses. With his fake tan and shiny car, he looks like the kind of asshole who assumes that everyone respects him even though he provides them zero reasons to do so. He’s planning to go surfing with his teenage son to show him the best view of the house he’s trying to buy, but when they get down to the beach with their boards, they’re met with a decidedly hostile jock who tells them in no uncertain terms (‘Don’t live here, don’t surf here’) that the area is for locals only.
At this stage, a reasonable person with a healthy sense of their own mortality might usher their son back to the car park and drive off into the blazing afternoon sun, and to his credit, Cage does. But he really wants that house, so he goes back to the beach after dropping his son off with his soon-to-be-ex wife and waits in the car, calling his mortgage lender and estate agent for updates. He meets up with an elderly man living out of his station wagon in the same car park and borrows his binoculars to spy on the gang of local surfers. They call themselves the Bay Boys, he learns, and they are led by a well-built older man with reflective teeth named Scally (Julian McMahon).
This is where things start to break down for Cage’s character. As night sets in, he watches the Bay Boys have a raucous party on the beach. When he goes to the public restroom, they steal his board and vandalise his car. When he confronts them about it, they assault him. The next morning, he discovers that the local cops are part of Scally’s crew and someone has put faeces in the water fountain. The battery in his car dies, preventing him from leaving. His phone dies, cutting him off from his credit card, so he trades his watch for a coffee.
At this stage in the film, Finnegan’s direction is at its best. He shoots the classically idyllic setting as a constantly shrinking cage. The sun’s glare beats down on Cage, who grows sweatier, dustier, and more dishevelled by the minute. A kookaburra sits in a tree near the car park, cackling incessantly. And the waves hit the beach repetitively, looking more like a dead-end than an escape. When the tension escalates and the Bay Boys turn out to be a full-blown cult for the Joe Rogan/Jordan Peterson crowd, Cage is in his element. Having lost everything, the character is reduced to an essential, animalistic brutality that turns into its own form of liberation.
Finnegan’s previous films, including 2019’s Vivarium and 2022’s Nocebo, feature similarly simple set-ups stretched over 90-plus minutes. The Surfer improves on both films purely through the strength of Cage’s performance. The character stays on and around the beach for the entire runtime, waiting, like a character in a Beckett play, for something that will never come. In the latter half of his career, Cage has made no attempt to be an actor in the classical sense. His freak-outs are legendary, and any director worth his or her salt will give the man something to sink his teeth into. The freak-out in this film is more of a slow burn than a fit of mania, but the cumulative effect is almost as satisfying.
Where the film falters is in its stabs at surrealism. Early scenes cut to brief flashes of the future version of the character, covered in dirt with cuts all over his face. There are also hints that the elderly man living out of his car might actually be Cage’s future self and that Cage could also be some version of his own father, who drowned on the beach many years before. With clear through-lines about consumerism and the seductiveness of hyper-masculinity in the modern age, muddying the waters with several potential time loops that never really come together feels a bit messy. It also obscures the primary takeaway of the movie, which is that sunny beaches are overrated.
‘The Surfer’ is in UK and Irish cinemas from May 9th.
