My mileage varies a lot on “Cage Rage” – the surprisingly prevalent subgenre of movies in which the entire thing is Nicolas Cage mugging at the camera and screaming. In these films, Cage’s presence tends to exert the effect of a supermassive black hole, dragging everything else into his orbit until it spaghettifies into nothingness when compared to his enormous, gurning face. So it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I settled down to watch Lorcan Finnegan’s new movie The Surfer.
The premise is classic Cage Rage. His unnamed character – who seems to be a reasonably successful mover and shaker in the corporate world – returns to the Australian bay of his birth, where he plans to buy a beautiful seafront house. When he takes his son down to the beach to surf, he is confronted by an aggressive group of men led by Scally (Julian McMahon) who tell him that “you don’t live here, you don’t surf here”.
What follows is a descent into madness, with the Surfer spending days in a small car park overlooking the beach – as if trapped there in a purgatorial state. It’s a garish nightmare world, with Finnegan swapping the cold greys of his excellent 2019 thriller Vivarium for the other end of the colour spectrum – vividly over-saturated, searing oranges and blues. Despite the wide, open space of the setting, Finnegan ensures the world feels claustrophobic and inescapable. The audience is held in place by the Surfer’s obsession just as he is.
Spending so much time with Cage could easily be a chore, but his performance is cleverly modulated through the deliberately punishing first hour or so. There are occasional moments that seem set for meme glory (“I hope it’s anchovy” he grumps at a pizza delivery guy) but, for the most part, Cage is guided by the material rather than his oddball impulses. By the time he erupts like a sweaty Vesuvius, we’re right there with him – driven mad by the heat, paranoia, and injustice. He’s spent days being plagued by petty theft, bags of dog poo, and drinking out of puddles, so you forgive him being a little miffed when the time comes.
Not everything works, it has to be said. The film wants to have something to say about toxic masculinity and occasionally gestures in a fascinating direction, only to lose its way in the trappings of its hallucinatory mystery structure. It’s a movie ultimately too mired in its choppy narrative waters to construct a coherent central ethos, though it buries you too deep into its madness for that to matter too much when the credits roll.
It’s easy to bracket The Surfer in with the Nicolas Cage midnight movie canon, placing its most over-cranked moments into meme-worthy montages alongside the ending of his disastrous remake of The Wicker Man. However, that would be to do a disservice to the star’s surprisingly restrained work in a film that, despite its thematic shortcomings, never lets go of its tension and sun-drenched psychological chaos. Just as with surfing, you sometimes just have to ride the wave.
The Surfer is in UK cinemas from 9th May.
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