One man so painfully passionate about his childhood home and surfing one specific beach that he may do just about anything to get his way. Well Nicolas Cage takes audiences on that journey, to see how far one man would go to get what he wants. Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer (2024) is tense and just like the surfer himself, audiences aren’t always aware of what is going on around him.
The Surfer follows a man (Cage) who returns to the Australian beachside hometown of his childhood with the mindset that he WILL purchase his old home for him and his family. He has spent many years in the U.S. to get to this point to be able to reclaim his home, but all that goes downhill when he is embarrassed in front of his son by the local Australian surfers. It is the locals’ turf, and they will go to extremes keeping tourists away. A fighter, or just plain crazy, the man remains at the beach and goes to war against these surfers. But as he continues to push them, he is the one who is pushed too far, taking himself to the edge of reality.
Oh boy do you, as an audience member, get the full experience. The highlight of The Surfer is in how they convey the sanity breaks that the man goes through. With gleams from the sun, glimmering flashes into the past, and hazy frames when he is either sunstroke or high, the audience sees the entire picture – well, the entire picture the man sees. He might not be all that with it, actually. We are made to believe he made a life for himself in the U.S., but as he loses grip on reality, as the viewer we are unaware of what story is true anymore. And this is absolutely where the film excels.
Turning into exactly what you would expect from a surfer film, the cult of the surfers. And in The Surfer, this cult is run by no other than Dr. Doom himself, just kidding. Scally (Julian McMahon – actor of Dr. Doom in The Fantastic Four) is the leader of the pack. As the man continues to pressure the surfers, it appears that Scally leads a darker tribe than just those who surf. A cult-like following somewhat reminiscent of Point Break (Bigelow, 1994), Scally and his pack bring people in and save them, before they can surf.
The Surfer even feels familiar to Cage’s other role in Dream Scenario (Borgli, 2023), both films about two men who are at their breaking point. Perhaps this is Cage’s new calling, playing deranged father figures, or just deranged figures in general – LongLegs (Perkins, 2024) for example.
Besides these familiar qualities of The Surfer, the way in which it is able to bring the viewer into this world and make them feel, or at least see, what the man does, allows it to excel beyond its familiarities. After its screening at the Glasgow Film Festival, The Surfer is set for a U.S. release date later this year and perhaps heading to other countries when the time comes.
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