Nicolas Cage Goes Wild in ‘The Surfer’
Nicolas Cage goes down under in the hallucinatory yet half-baked psychological thriller "The Surfer."
Ever since Nicolas Cage revitalized his career with a disarmingly moving performance in 2021’s Pig, critics have found it irresistible to psychoanalyze his roles and their applicability to his own arc.
In his late career, the actor seems drawn to once-great characters down on their luck, their glory days behind them. Coincidence? Maybe not.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) literalized the personal resonance — Cage played a fictionalized version of himself in a movie unworthy of his genius — while 2023’s Dream Scenario satirized the torment of losing control of your public image. It’s ironic, then, that the Moonstruck star has clawed back to big-screen prominence by playing such washed-up losers.
The comeback tour rattles on with The Surfer, an oddball project that straddles the line between lowbrow exploitation flick and the higher-profile critical hits that have powered the recent Cage revival. On one hand, The Surfer premiered at Cannes to positive reviews, but on the other, this Australia-set thriller has its roots in the seedy “Ozploitation” films (think 1971’s Wake in Fright in particular) that thrived during the 1970s and 1980s.
And, in a moderately crazed performance, Cage brings us another pitiable soul fallen on hard times as he strives to reconnect with an old love: surfing. In a surely relatable touch for Cage, this character even has some real estate woes on his mind, though they’re the least of his troubles as he winds up bloodied, bruised, dehydrated, and effectively homeless by the climax of this lushly photographed yet thinly conceived psychological thriller.
But let’s back up. Directed by Irishman Lorcan Finnegan (Without Name, Vivarium), the film is set entirely in and around an idyllic beach in Australia’s Lunar Bay, a haven for the surfers who congregate there. A bearded Cage, seemingly the only non-Aussie onscreen, plays an unnamed man (let’s just call him the surfer) who grew up a stone’s throw from the beach, then moved to California after his father’s death, hence the lack of an Australian accent (thank god).
Now a middle-aged, newly separated father, the surfer returns to this place with his teenage son (Finn Little) and a lofty plan to buy back his childhood home overlooking the beach, which is just barely out of his price range. All he wants, as he states throughout the film, “is to take my son surfing.”
That plan goes awry when the surfer finds the ostensibly public beach controlled by a gang of “Bay Boys,” hostile locals who call him “Fuckface” and steal his surfboard. The beach, they explain, is for locals only: “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” as one kid snottily jeers in his face.
The gang’s ringleader, Scally (Julian McMahon), is a wealthy hotshot who enforces these rules with violence and who leads his acolytes in bizarre, cult-like rituals by night, branding them with hot spears and affirming his philosophy that “before you surf, you must suffer.” In fact, the only beach regular who treats Cage’s surfer with kindness is a homeless older man, who pops in and out of the film and proves more central to the storyline than we initially suspect.
For days, the surfer hunkers down at the beach and its adjoining parking lot. As he does psychological battle with these masculinity-poisoned surfer-thugs, his whole life begins to unravel, his dignity along with it. His phone and fancy watch are pilfered by the proprietor of a local snack stand; his car gets stolen by the young hooligans.
Through a series of misfortunes that may strain your ability to suspend disbelief, the surfer winds up living out of a station wagon, his face scaly and burnt by the midday sun, his feet cut by glass. During the film’s hallucinatory act, he is reduced to sipping water from puddles and considers scavenging on a dead rat for sustenance. But it’s when he’s finally driven to violence against one of his tormentors that The Surfer sidesteps the conventional revenge-movie trajectory and goes in some unexpected directions, as Scally finally begins to welcome him as a worthy visitor to the beach.
Cage gets some nice moments of scenery-chewing madness as he frightens unsuspecting beachgoers, ranting and raving about the broker who’s supposedly calling him to close on that house, and he does a fine job of calibrating the surfer’s loosening grip on sanity. The film seems reverse-engineered to be a late-career Cage cult classic on par with 2009’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or 2018’s Mandy or even 1989’s Vampire’s Kiss, which Cage has called his “laboratory.”
But its lunacy never comes close to those heights, and the film lacks the black humor that made those sordid classics pop. Its interrogations of toxic masculinity and pack behavior are interesting but undeniably heavy-handed. What’s more, there’s a half-baked twist ending that I suspect will take multiple Reddit threads to wrap your head around.
So what, beyond Cage’s admirably committed performance, makes The Surfer worth watching? Well, it’s a visual treat, filmed on location in Western Australia and jammed with shots of that turquoise-blue ocean and those gleaming waves and some dazzling sunsets. We get close-up shots of lizards and porcupines and other Australian critters, and if The Surfer is ultimately a B-movie at heart — both in stylistic lineage and in quality — there’s an A+ nature documentary lurking in its footage.
The Surfer (★★★☆☆) is Rated R and is playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
Zach Schonfeld is the author of How Coppola Became Cage (Oxford University Press), available wherever you buy books. He reviews movies for Metro Weekly.
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