The Surfer, 2025.
Directed by Lorcan Finnegan.
Starring Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Justin Rosniak, Alexander Bertrand, Rahel Romahn, Nicholas Cassim, Finn Little, Charlotte Maggi, Nina Young, James Bingham, Miranda Tapsell, Radek Jonak, Rory O’Keeffe, Talon Hopper, Sally Clune, Gautier de Fontaine, Jake Fryer-Hornsby, Adam Leeuwenhart, Dean McAskil, Tobiasz Rodney, Adam Sollis, Oliver Webb, Daniel Williamson, and Austen Wilmot.
SYNOPSIS:
A man returns to the idyllic beach of his childhood to surf with his son. When he is humiliated by a group of locals, the man is drawn into a conflict that keeps rising and pushes him to his breaking point.
While bonding with his son on a drive to an Australian beach, Nicolas Cage’s The Surfer (as he is credited) gives a speech about taking the waves as they come (that’s the gist), which he then explains is a metaphor for the ups and downs of life. It’s an amusing, tongue-in-cheek moment, but as the one-note premise of director Lorcan Finnegan and screenwriter Thomas Martin’s The Surfer, it makes for a film that becomes increasingly agonizing and torturous to sit through by the second, especially since the point is hammered home by the 30-minute mark. In hindsight, the filmmakers essentially announce from the outset, “this is all we’ve got” in our take on Wake in Fright, an acclaimed Australian film about toxic masculinity that has suddenly become a significantly increased influence on psychological horror over the past couple of years.
Having bonded with his now deceased father over surfing before that tragic passing because his mother to move the family to Los Angeles (a clever way of getting around an Australian-born Nicolas Cage potentially butchering the Aussie accent), The Surfer wants to catch that connection down to his teenage son (Finn Little), credited as The Kid. However, the more The Surfer speaks about his current predicament, it immediately becomes evident that the presumably wealthy businessman is trying to purchase back his childhood home under the delusional fantasy that it will resolve his midlife crisis, which includes his wife leaving him and his subsequent relationship with another man. The Kid has no plans of spending Christmas with his father, and generally comes across as actively disinterested in interacting.
That turns out to be the least of The Surfer’s problems, as once he gets to the beach of his childhood, he finds it is now occupied by a trust-fund psychopathic cult leader named Scally (Julian McMahon), who essentially lives and indoctrinate the local beach bums into believing that suffering is an integral part of achieving a transcendental type of freedom and one’s dreams. It also means that he and everyone in the vicinity are going to mess with The Surfer in every possible way, attempting to break him psychologically.
This is achieved through a 4-D chess manipulation, which sees The Surfer lose everything, including his surfboard, the chance at closing the deal on buying back his childhood home, his cherished watch inherited from his father, his car, his wallet, and his phone. Why stop there? He also gets the crap kicked out of him on more than one occasion, and eventually finds himself with no other drinking options other than grossly colored bathroom water.
The silver lining is that Nicolas Cage isn’t going for broke here; this is a more nuanced, pitiful mental breakdown that fits the slow-burning, gradual manipulation of the cult. Throughout this surreal descent into madness, some other questions are raised, such as why the police officers seem to be allowing this madness (the cult violently attacks anyone who isn’t a local) and whether or not it means anything that his only ally is an elderly bearded man who not only also has a grudge against these quacks, but looks like he could be Nicolas Cage covered in heavy makeup effects. None of those questions are necessarily answered.
Compliments are earned for cinematographer Radek Ladczuk, capturing the sweltering heat of Christmastime Australia by the beach, with it at times being tough to tell the difference between whether Nicolas Cage is sunburned or bruised. Either way, he continuously becomes a disheveled, beet-red, sweaty, homeless-looking mess across his never-ending nightmare. There is also a hazy, dreamlike score from composer François Tétaz that fits the vibe.
The surrealist, bizarre tone is reminiscent of Lorcan Finnegan’s previous psychological mind-melter Vivarium, which also dealt with a similar subversion of suburban life (although more of a fixation on turning parenting into a nightmare), but that film felt more striking in its style and horror while also knowing what it wanted to say and how to say it while freaking the viewer out. As for The Surfer, it’s more excruciatingly aggravating waiting for Nicolas Cage to do something about any of this inevitably. Meanwhile, the cult feels like an afterthought, beginning and ending in characterization as a clichéd perspective on toxic masculinity. These are waves not worth surfing; wiping out and drowning would undoubtedly be more eventful and possibly more entertaining.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
