The Surfer ★★★★

Released: 9th May 2025

Director: Lorcan Finnegan

Starring: Nicolas Cage

Sun, sweat and salty revenge are baked into Lorcan Finnegan’s fourth feature, The Surfer, a dehydrated Ozploitation daydream headlined by king of crazy Nicolas Cage in yet another arty B-picture where he harbours an extremely middle-aged grievance. His latest chapter has seen him mostly depart from the bill-paying DTV pictures that threatened to meme him into oblivion, moving towards facilitating the visions of distinctive up-and-coming directors. From Panos Cosmatos to Michael Sarnoski, Cage’s recent collaborations have pushed the limits of his brand to new and interesting places, and whether he’s reined in or (yes) uncaged, Cage remains a unique beast. That same boundary-pushing energy inflects The Surfer, sometimes against the better instincts of its unwieldy screenplay.

The story’s sun rises on Cage’s eponymous nameless wave-lover visiting an idyllic southwestern Australian beach with his sullen teen (Finn Little), surfboards at the ready for a tubular day of father-son bonding. The Surfer holds a great affection for this particular spot; he was born and raised here until the age of 15, before adverse circumstances cast him adrift to a new life in California. Past his prime and yearning for the simplicity of years gone by, his plans of buying back his childhood home and enjoying the local amenities are thwarted by a local mantra: “don’t live here, don’t surf here”. On top of taking rejection poorly, his beloved board is soon stolen and his life systematically ruined by the enigmatic Scally (Julian McMahon) and his loyal hyper-masculine cronies. Cage’s pushover of a man then embarks on a psychological journey that chips away at his very soul, where his status as a surfer, father and functional human being is tested to its very limit. 

There’s something unexpectedly Kafkaesque about the way Thomas Martin’s script plots the rising action from this point on. Viewers expecting straightforward revenge thrills may be taken aback by just how much of The Surfer is made up of Cage wandering around a beachside car park, unable to leave for a variety of increasingly absurd, cruel reasons. His need to get his board back sees him sleep in his car, leaving the aircon on overnight to combat the oppressive heat, running down his battery as flat as a pancake. That kicks off a terrible cycle where one modern convenience after another is taken from him in a cosmically unfair series of incidents where he could easily physically walk away, but won’t, because of his dogged attachment to nostalgia and desperate need for acceptance. It’s quite a clever move tying this woozy plot to such abstract reasoning, illustrating a thoroughly pathetic portrait of a man who refuses to move on in any way, shape or form. 

The DNA of Ted Kotcheff’s towering Outback masterpiece Wake in Fright runs deep in The Surfer‘s veins, and the Finnegan-Martin partnership tips its hat to its ancestor well; from its red-hot Christmas setting to its foreign protagonist losing his mind as he fails to assimilate into the hedonistic culture, the two films work alongside each other beautifully. Perhaps more unexpectedly, Frank Perry’s underrated psychological drama The Swimmer is also a close cousin; while the Burt Lancaster-starring vehicle may be rooted primarily in virile American masculinity, the two occupy the same shimmering dreamscape structure where reality is never a certainty and scenes move episodically between one another with loose fluidity. Finnegan’s cineliteracy is evident and sometimes electrifying, knowing exactly what to remix in service of his own growing voice. 

What Finnegan misses is creating the heady mystery of his forebears’ work. Martin’s writing folds in plenty of peripheral characters who appear as reflections of Cage’s Surfer caught in a wacky funfair mirror, and Finnegan uses these parallels in the editing room for some ominous foreshadowing along the way. Yet Martin writes the film into too many choppy currents for the action to gracefully glide out of, hitting an i-dotting, t-crossing finale about 80 minutes in and then continuing for another quarter of an hour. By the time the Surfer’s mental (in both meanings of the word) and physical journey is over, the lingering sense of disorientation created by the first two acts is immediately washed away by the time the credits roll, buffing off all of its interesting rough edges in favour of a tidy conclusion where tragedy and justice go hand-in-hand. 

Yet a great ending is perhaps not what people were looking for with The Surfer anyway, because who is going to roll up for this pleasantly oblique fare without the guarantee of Cage having fun chewing the scenery for the umpteenth time over his 40+ year career? A good sight more lively than his last excuse for a holiday (the dire Retirement Plan), Cage is locked-in to the role’s more eccentric touches from the get-go; his thinning rusty blonde hairpiece immediately lets you know you’re in brilliantly wiggy territory with the Man of a Thousand Hairstyles, and things just get better from there. From some brilliantly wobbly line-reads (“DEWD! Tha-at’s my bo-oard!”) to a full-blown demo of whatever a Nicolas Cage Homeless Simulator would look like, his burning desire to explore the acting form to its outer limits has not dulled in the slightest. He elevates the material to the absurd heights it needs to reach to scorch itself into your retinas, and then goes further; the use of a dead rat in the vengeful mitts of Nicolas Cage is an early contender for the most gonzo scene of the year, and we should be very grateful he’s still willing to do such insane things for our entertainment. Julian MacMahon’s dryrobe-wearing scumbag offers fun support as the architect of Cage’s breakdown, yet no one can quite match what Cage is doing with this silly but substantial material.

While it doesn’t reach the levels of pathos found in Pig or the feverish madness of Mandy, The Surfer paddles in as another solid entry into Cage’s middle-aged-bloke-with-a-specific-bone-to-pick subgenre very nicely. Bringing unhinged energy to the role is exactly what Finnegan needed to explore his own directorial palette too, bursting into something fresh and vibrant after the muted moodiness of Vivarium and Nocebo. Wherever the tide takes Cage and Finnegan next is yet to be seen, but they certainly have found a brah in one another should they hang together further down the line.