We never learn the name of Nicolas Cage’s character in The Surfer. (He is credited simply as ‘The Surfer’.) It might, then, be tempting to think that this film — which features yet another Cage character slowly descending into madness — is simply an example of the ‘Nicolas Cage Type’, of ‘Cage Rage’, of the kind of uniquely bizarre freakout that has for years provided ample fodder for meme-merchants and YouTube compilation editors.
But this is not quite the Cage of bees and bunnies in boxes. Instead it’s a surreal, somewhat psychedelic riff on Hitchcockian suspense from Irish director Lorcan Finnegan, who has specialised in such material (2019’s Vivarium, 2022’s Nocebo), and in turn Cage seems to be channelling something closer to Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo, or Michael Douglas in Falling Down: an ordinary but obsessive man, pushed to his limits.
The crazy here is coming from outside of Cage as much as within, and Finnegan’s direction, along with Thomas Martin’s script, nods to the neo-Hitchcock, too. There are echoes of British classics like Straw Dogs, Eden Lake, Bait, or Edward and Tubbs from The League Of Gentlemen: a story about a local beach for local people. Cage’s character comes up against the least chill group of surfers this side of Point Break: obnoxious, wetsuited bullies, quick to violence, and hostile to outsiders.
For such an unhinged role, Cage is remarkably understated.
The surfers are led by Scally (Julian MacMahon), emerging as an Andrew Tate-esque men’s-rights cult figure, their behaviour excused and accommodated by the effective omertà of their community. That includes one startling side character who waves it all away thusly: “If it stops them beating the Botox out of their wives, so be it.”
Cage’s character — obsessively trying to buy a house he can’t afford, reconnect with his family, and just catch a break, figurative and literal — is infuriated. Incrementally and exponentially, he begins to lose the plot, the gaslighting sending him towards something resembling a psychotic episode, inviting us, the audience, to question reality, too. Though the temptation might have been to go even more extreme, his performance is perfectly pitched, responding to the tyranny of his foes — and the relentless Australian sun — with a hazy confusion. For such an unhinged role, he is remarkably understated. (He does slurp beer from a car-park puddle and stuff a rat in his pocket, but that’s relatively tame for this guy.)
That sense of disorientation is compounded by Finnegan’s filming style, summoning a similar sense of hyperreal unhingery via wide-angle-lens close-ups, oversaturated cinematography, and the jazzy intrigue of François Tétaz’s score. The screen shimmers and ripples with tension and heat. While the ending feels a little scrappily assembled, this for the most part delivers precisely tuned psychological thrills. It’s the cinematic equivalent of getting sunstroke.