The triggers for Nicolas Cage’s vengeful ire have grown increasingly obscure of late. Normally, he’s battling to get back his wife (2018’s Mandy), his daughter (2012’s Stolen), or his granddaughter (2011’s Drive Angry). Now he’s battling to get back his favourite hog (2021’s Pig) and, with The Surfer, his favourite longboard. Yet, these films, inevitably, offer the same sell: people come for the Cage-ness of it all, the bug-eyed grimace, the air karate chop, the erratic, ever-escalating inflection. It’s the inevitable metric by which they’re judged.
But as Cage grows more violent over smaller transgressions, directors have offered him a little more room to work. The Surfer is what you might call a slow-burn Cage. There’s the manic, hollering prize at the end (and even a line of dialogue worthy of a future meme), but also plenty of the actor’s more undervalued speciality – the expression of gargantuan helplessness, the look of a fish who’s been thrown to land and left to die.
Here, he plays an Australian-born, American-raised businessman returning to his birthplace with the intention of buying his family’s old beach home. Life has turned cruel for him: his estranged wife is shacked up with another man, his son (Finn Little) seems distant, and his boss is wondering why he turned up to their last meeting with no shoes or socks.
The plan, then, is to come back and reroot himself, to reconstruct his innocence. Only, the second he turns up to his old surfing haunt, the local “Bay Boys” get up in his face and bellow, “don’t live here, don’t surf here”. He’s become a stranger to everywhere. When the Bay Boys swipe his surfboard, he’s left haunting the beach car park.
Somehow he’s both unable and unwilling to leave, as he’s systematically stripped of his possessions and identity, dehydrated and near-starved to death in the sweltering Australian heat. “I have a car! I have a job! I have a name!” he cries. Ironically, we never do find out the last one in that list. It makes us feel complicit in his humiliation.
Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan is fluent in the language of disorientation. Every crash zoom, every leering close-up, every flash forward (or backward?), every mocking cutaway to Australian wildlife, every shot of a split bag of dog faeces strategically dropped on the water fountain – it all exists to push Cage’s character towards the expected endpoint of total insanity. Under the glare of Razek Ladczuk’s sun-baked cinematography, the actor’s skin has never looked more orange and his teeth so white.
It’s effective. Finnegan has deployed such open-air claustrophobia multiple times before. In his second feature, Vivarium, Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg played a couple who move into a suburban development, only to realise they can never leave. Its ideas were whip-smart and coherent – the pair looked, essentially, like they were trapped in a René Magritte painting, forced to enact heteronormativity against their own will.
Here, Thomas Martin’s script loads the ammo but fails to land the shot. The Surfer is about individualism and masculinity, about the desire to own and claim space. Julian McMahon plays Bay Boy leader Scally with a finely tuned mix of breezy confidence and open hostility, while wearing a red towel hoodie that could easily be mistaken for cultist’s robes.
It’s pointed out that he is, to quote, a “trust fund bitch”, appropriating the bohemian beach lifestyle (and, at certain points, Aboriginal culture). But to what degree he and our protagonist share, or don’t share, in the vicious cycle of bro-hood feels hazy. The Surfer, instead, simply relinquishes control to Cage. That’s fine. It’s always a pleasure to see him lose it.
Dir: Lorcan Finnegan. Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nicholas Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak. Cert 15, 99 minutes.
‘The Surfer’ is in cinemas from 9 May
