“Born in a storm way out to sea. Brewing and churning for days, weeks, months, sometimes even years, and it’s all building to this breaking point – short sharp shock of violence on the shore – and you either surf it or you get wiped out.” Thus, Nicolas Cage‘s unnamed surfer character tells his unnamed teenage son (Finn Little) in The Surfer. Cage can’t believe his son’s apathetic reaction. “You know, that was my best surfing-as-a-metaphor-for-life speech, I was hoping for a little more enthusiasm.” As the endowment of wisdom goes from inside the car to the beautiful vistas of Luna Bay, it’s clear the man sharing the metaphor doesn’t understand it.
His marriage is in shambles, trouble at work, and the dream of buying his childhood home is gone. The Surfer is a testament to the pending violence he references. The Surfer’s dream of sharing the water with his son is short-lived, and the last push he needs to reach his breaking point. Scally (Julian McMahon), the handsome, charming leader of the Bay Boys, prevents anyone but locals from hitting the waves. Some tourists are content with a warning; others catch a beating. You can imagine which type of man the Surfer is.
Previously a top dog in the boardroom, the Surfer mistakenly assumes that means anything in real life. The crew of virile young beach rats remind him otherwise. The Surfer retreats to the parking lot for sympathy, but locals are all too happy to keep the violence contained to the beach, lest Scally goes after one of them. We allow poison to manifest because we don’t want to be the ones to deal with it, which is a recurring motif of the film. As played by McMahon, Scally is an undeniable force with a magnetic draw to him, even as he commits horrible acts. Scally knows his cult can get away with anything.
Watching the Surfer continuously fail drives his son away. His wedding ring and father’s watch are gone. Only the tattered suit on his back remains. But leaving the beach never crosses the Surfer’s mind. To suffer this humiliation would be the last straw. His childhood memories of surfing that beach are the only pure moments of his life that he has left. Not recreating those moments drives the Surfer to the breaking point. Living in the parking lot, with only Bum (Nicholas Cassim) for conversation, the Surfer breaks down. Frustrations mount as the smothering Australian heat takes its toll, and the Surfer sees Bum as a crystallization of how his life ends: a deranged weirdo mumbling to himself in a parking lot until the end of his days.
There’s a rich tradition of films where men go to Australia and lose their minds (Wake in Fright, Road Games, Long Weekend), but none of those films have Nicolas Cage. The Surfer’s masculinity is in crisis, but Scally seems well-off. Soon, Scally’s absurd mantra, “Before you can surf, you must suffer,” starts making sense to the Surfer. It’s not that the abusive leader of beach weirdos has been the one torturing him, no. Scally’s enlightening him. But the Surfer wasn’t receptive to his messaging before. The crash of the waves becomes a droning noise you can’t escape. The ocean’s draw impossible to ignore, you start to listen to the drone for clues, deciphering meaning from the static.
Lorcan Finnegan’s previous films have a flair for the surreal (Vivarium, Nocebo), and The Surfer is no different. While those films had fantastical premises, this film relies on Cage to portray a downward spiral. When Cage goes for it—and he often does—he needs to play off another actor. Too often low-budget films don’t give him a sparring partner. McMahon, with his deranged smile and masculine bravado, is more than game to match insanity with Cage. Cage’s commitment to playing the slow unraveling of a man’s sanity is always fun (his gonzo performance elevated Mandy to a cult classic), and it’s no different with this film. It’s a role that Cage does well and often.
Finnegan wears the audience down as harshly as his leading man. The mystic score drones on as the color palette takes on darker hues, burning Cage’s skin and, in the process, our retinas. The parking lot, where most of the film resides, takes on a hellish quality. The cinematography cued into the heat radiating off the asphalt. The water is the only refreshing thing on the screen, but, like the Surfer, we can’t go there. We can only embrace the storm.
