Nicolas Cage wages struggle on a gang of hostile Australian surfers who stole his surfboard.
That is the elevator pitch for The Surfer, a trippy psychological thriller directed by Lorcan Finnegan (Nocebo, Vivarium) and written by Thomas Martin. However there’s extra afoot throughout the riptide of this unusually hypnotic movie, which ruminates on poisonous masculinity and unprocessed trauma whereas placing Cage by way of absolutely the ringer.
Taking artistic cues from Ozploitation classics of the Australian New Wave like Wake in Fright, Finnegan concurrently reveres and villainizes the Australian panorama, blurring the road between actuality and surrealism whereas throwing the whole lot he has on the Hollywood star. Cage delivers a characteristically unhinged efficiency, although he is on the danger of being upstaged by an distinctive Julian McMahon.
What’s The Surfer about?
Credit score: Roadside Sights
Equal components tense survival thriller and coastal Western, The Surfer basically takes place inside one location: the confines of a beachside parking zone within the fictional suburb of Luna Bay, Western Australia. (It was filmed in Yallingup, positioned in Wadandi Nation, the normal land of the Wadandi individuals.)
Credited simply as “The Surfer,” Cage’s character is a person bursting with nostalgia and idealism. Returning to the Australian city he grew up in after a life in California, he is anxious to lastly purchase his childhood house and reunite his household. He is a traditional divorced dad, waxing lyrical about browsing as a metaphor for all times in speeches geared toward his estranged teenage son (Yellowstone‘s Finn Little). However his lofty quest to shut the deal and safe a seaside utopia is disrupted by hostile locals, who will not have a bar of him.
When the Surfer makes an attempt to log on together with his son, he comes head to head with the Bay Boys, a gang of surfers decided to “keep the riffraff out” of their waves — i.e. non-locals. They’re brilliantly described by a carpark-dwelling character crudely credited as “The Bum” (Nicholas Cassim) as a “bunch of fuckin’ yuppies cosplaying at being surfers.” Devoted to their mustachioed gang chief Scottie “Scally” Callahan (a superb Julian McMahon), this hollering group of violent bleached blondes in tank tops humiliate and harass Cage’s protagonist, stealing his surfboard and creating hell for him. As for the native police officer (Justin Rosniak), he is in Scally’s pocket too.
As quickly as he arrives on the Luna Bay break, the Surfer begins to lose. With dwindling private results, rising dehydration, no allies, and a teetering grip on actuality, the Surfer wages an uphill battle in opposition to his downhill enemies. In some way, Finnegan and Martin handle to concoct a endless provide of misfortune for his or her protagonist, all whereas presenting the locals as deeply corrupt and self-serving. However there’s extra to this place than it initially seems for the long-suffering Surfer.
The Surfer traps Nicolas Cage within the parking zone from hell.
Credit score: Roadside Sights
The whole lot of The Surfer is ready inside an asphalt area, the beachside carpark overlooking the waves that Cage’s character so desperately needs to surf once more. That the Surfer himself is contained to this bitumen plain mirrors his denied entry to the seashore. Nonetheless, this limitation does not imply the movie is boring by any means, due to Cage’s signature slow-burn unraveling.
Cage has been unpredictable in his movie decisions over the previous few years, from his serial killer transformation in Longlegs to taking part in an amped-up model of himself in The Insufferable Weight of Huge Expertise. Right here, he is tasked with carrying the entire movie as a person simply attempting to get his stolen surfboard again and catch a wave, and Cage really leans into gaslit delirium.
Mashable Prime Tales
Cage’s character is pushed to the brink within the movie, as his characters typically are. However right here he is consuming beer out of puddles, consuming useless rats, and having his naked ft shredded by carpark damaged glass, utterly on the mercy of what’s on no account a distant setting. As Cage’s character stumbles by way of misfortune after misfortune, the movie cleverly and organically turns into a sort of survival drama set inside a comparatively busy beachside suburb. At many factors in The Surfer, you are mainly yelling on the display screen for this man to get a lodge room and name it a day — two issues just about at all times obtainable to him throughout his turmoil. However there is a deeper cause for the Surfer’s willpower.
What Finnegan’s manufacturing staff manages to create inside one seaside battleground is nothing in need of spectacular. However most likely essentially the most gorgeous achievement of the movie is utilizing Australia’s idyllic pure magnificence and browsing tradition to dive into the sinister realities of poisonous masculinity.
The Surfer dives into a very Australian model of aggressive male conduct.
Julian McMahon and Justin Rosniak in “The Surfer.”
Credit score: Roadside Sights
The Surfer is, at its core, a rumination on the dangerous results of hypermasculinity. Nevertheless it’s a very Australian, and significantly violent type of it, with the nation’s tendency to dismiss male toxicity and violence as “larrikin” behaviour. “Boys will be boys,” a personality actually says aloud on this movie.
Finnegan and Martin use browsing tradition and the terrifying Bay Boys to sharpen their give attention to misogyny and superiority complexes, in addition to hammering house Australia’s skewed sense of native id. (The movie’s native surfer gang, the Bay Boys, appears a refined nod to the actual surf gang from Sydney’s Maroubra Seashore, the Bra Boys.) Whereas the movie does not tackle the hypocrisy of such localism in a rustic with a violent colonial previous, it does go onerous on the final messaging of preserving outsiders out, locals in. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” the Surfer is violently instructed by the locals. “Locals only” indicators adorn the seashore.
It is the top of this predatory pack who threatens to upstage Cage in The Surfer: McMahon because the chilling Scally. Swanning about with a deep tan and a bright-red seashore poncho, this character is so blatantly but amiably menacing that he will get proper below your pores and skin (and that of Cage’s character) with chilly finesse. Working his “Sanctuary” for younger surfers and their problematically youthful teen woman guests — no woman surfers right here, no means — Scally’s complete deal is that fashionable males have “gone soft” and “haven’t had to suffer.” He preaches this to his younger followers, encouraging them to unleash their internal “animal” inside their seashore haven. Underneath Scally’s tutelage, the Bay Boys’ abrasive, territorial behaviour is not simply allowed by the remainder of the group, it is inspired, with Cage’s Surfer encountering the identical stage of anti-outsider animosity by different non-surfer locals he comes throughout within the lot.
Actually, there are solely two characters in the complete movie who aren’t complete assholes to the Surfer: his son and a confoundingly underused Miranda Tapsell (Prime Finish Marriage ceremony) as a pleasant photographer who helps him out. It is overwhelming, this unrelenting hostility. And it has been used as a weapon in lots of an Australian movie.
The Surfer stylistically rides the Australian New Wave.
Credit score: Roadside Sights
The Surfer is on no account the primary to make a nightmare of Australia’s pure setting, amping up the warmth, daylight, and mysteries of the bush for psychological thrills. However Finnegan seems to pay tribute to such Australian New Wave thrillers of the ’70s and ’80s like Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright, Everett De Roche’s Razorback, and Tony Williams’ Subsequent of Kin. Wake in Fright is essentially the most overt reference right here, as a movie by which an outsider can also be pushed to insanity by the locals — a psychological state solely intensified by the cruel warmth and harmful dehydration.
Director of pictures Radek Ladczuk, cinematographer for Jennifer Kent’s brutal Tasmanian movie The Nightingale in addition to The Babadook, makes a Australian New Wave meal of The Surfer. Meticulously gradual or audaciously quick zooms really feel proper out of the ’70s, proving to be a hilariously kitsch however unusually genuine option to seize Cage’s earnestness over his beloved waves. Lighting furthers The Surfer‘s barely surreal feeling; the complete movie feels prefer it’s been drenched in a golden daylight filter, which strikes from idyllic to dangerously searing. The carpark itself glows in green-lit darkness at occasions, whereas the lot’s cursed bathroom block glows an ominous orange. Ladczuk takes full benefit of the unusual distortions mirrored by steel mirrors sometimes present in Australian public bathroom blocks.
Then there’s that rating by François Tétaz and sound design by Aza Hand, leading to a hypnotic, bonkers smorgasbord of operatic singing, chimes and harps, and blissful orchestral overtures uniquely mixed with the sounds of Australian wildlife. Cicadas chirp loudly and relentlessly, a kookaburra’s well-known chortle turns into a cursed rhythm, and buzzing flies rise because the Surfer’s maintain on actuality slips. It is this mix of caprice, risk, magnificence, and overwhelming powerlessness that makes The Surfer deeply efficient.
All the things about The Surfer‘s one-line pitch sounds ridiculous (Nicolas Cage versus imply Australian surfers), however the movie itself is a haunting set piece about localism, repressed reminiscence, and poisonous masculinity, boasting the wild experience we have come to affiliate with Cage. It is as removed from a wipeout as you will get.
The Surfer is in theaters now.
UPDATE: Apr. 30, 2025, 4:38 p.m. EDT “The Surfer” was reviewed out of the BFI London Movie Competition. This assessment was first printed on Oct. 11, 2024, and has been up to date for its theatrical launch.
