The Surfer: Nicolas Cage is driven over the edge by a psychotic cult in this twisty thriller
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The ever-protean Nicolas Cage doesn’t do much surfing in The Surfer, which is vaguely disappointing, but also the film’s whole point. His character in this deft psychological thriller is an extremely divorced dad in Perth, who yearns to feel young and vigorous again – for the sensation of salt on his skin. He pulls his son out of school one day for an impromptu jaunt, two boards on the roof rack, to the beach where he spent balmy days of his youth.
There’s an ulterior motive, which is that Cage’s nameless character has made an offer on his childhood home there and wants to show off the scenery. But it’s bad news on all fronts. He’s gazumped, while also being bullied off the beach by a clan of locals, who refuse access to anyone they don’t know.
Even after the kid has gone home, his old man makes the peculiar decision to hang around and the aggression steps up: this hateful posse steal his board, taunt, threaten and humiliate him. We guess he’ll snap, but we have no idea how, and this is where Lorcan Finnegan’s film subverts initial expectations.
Like the marvellous 2021 drama Pig, a high point in the recent Cage oeuvre, it’s a shape-shifter: Finnegan could have dished out a roaring rampage of revenge, but the payoffs get more trippy and internalised. Cage is pitted against the creepily intense Julian McMahon as the leader of the gang, cluing us in with his piercing gaze that we’re dealing with some kind of psychotic masculinity cult. His name is Scally, not Andrew Tate, but they’d probably see eye to eye.
Fans of the durable Kurt Russell-vehicle Breakdown may sense a more static twist on those conflicts, but Cage’s increasing dishevelment gets way more extreme – indeed, it’s this hapless character’s own breakdown that really becomes the meat of the matter. Parked overnight above the cove, he lets his phone battery die and ignores work for days on end; he runs out of food and water, gets sunburnt, cuts his feet on broken glass and staggers around like a vagrant.
By the end, we’re almost in Hobo with a Shotgun territory, except this man isn’t armed with any such thing – just a set of tragic grievances about how his life panned out, and a desperation to recapture the glory days.
Cage commits, again, to his latest malcontent on the verge, without troubling himself with an Aussie accent in any way, which is classic Cage. It’s a performance that belongs quite high up in the canon: you won’t soon forget the mania in his eyes when he ravenously chomps on a dead rat.
99 min, cert TBC. Screening at Cannes Film Festival; UK release date TBC
