This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.
Nicolas Cage has been known to give himself completely to a character and their circumstances, and his work in Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer is the latest testament to that skill. A quintessential midnight movie, the bold and brutal film is Cage at his rowdiest, giving him every bit of the spotlight to do what he does best: go entirely mad. His performance makes way for an exciting yet crushing look at how brutality, pride, and confidence can threaten to poison everything we work for.
It might come as a surprise that there’s very little surfing in The Surfer, which is more concerned with the dark side of machismo, male anxiety, territorial pissing contests, and social class than it is with hitting the waves. This is what makes it more than a fun romp, as Cage tussles with the feral gang of locals who control the idyllic Australian beach he once called his own. (Their claim: “You don’t live here, you don’t surf here.”) Over the course of one scorching Christmas holiday, Cage’s unnamed protagonist – who’s returned to the Gold Coast with his son to purchase his family home – is forced deeper and deeper into insanity. His spiral culminates in a soul-crushing ending that questions our treatment of those who’ve fallen into houselessness from a life of stability. Under these most dire of circumstances, The Surfer forces its lead to empathize and connect.
The thriller bolsters its cruel world with a stylized visual palette of greens and yellows. unnatural colors that remove The Surfer from our reality and give it the feeling of a fable or a parable. Sometimes, the air around Cage shudders and ripples like smoke from a gas grill, contributing to the heat-stroke absurdity of his ordeal. Difficult moments for the character are often chased with cuts to the native fauna, a smart and unsettling choice that fosters our sense of dread as Cage’s character falls farther and farther down the rabbit hole.
Down that rabbit hole lie a few major twists, and they pack a solid punch. They contribute to the brain-scrambling sensation that places the audience directly in Cage’s shoes as he comes to terms with what’s happening to him on this beach. This is the real success of Thomas Martin’s script and Finngean’s direction, which work together to make us feel as if Cage’s experience is our own. Martin’s dialogue gets to the heart of how warped we become when we lose all sense of stability, while Finnegan zeroes in on Cage’s emotional state through close-ups of his eyes.
It’s a harsh journey, but the destination is a hopeful one. The Surfer ultimately hinges on the idea that we aren’t so different from one another, and we all deserve to live the lives we strive for – as long as we aren’t hurting anyone else. The toxic masculinity of the film’s characters threatens this notion, even challenging it in the gang’s mantra: “You can’t surf if you don’t suffer.” Through that suffering, Cage’s character learns that he’s even more entitled to his peace than he thought he was when he first came to the beach. We are all connected, and we all have a right to exist among each other – and if that’s taken from you, The Surfer’s powerhouse ending asserts that there’s a chance that you deserved it.
