The Surfer Rides The Wave Of a Deranged Nicolas Cage Performance
The sun-soaked exploitation film takes us on a trip through the pitfalls of toxic masculinity.
“Don’t live here, don’t surf here.”
That’s the hostile warning that keeps getting repeated to Nicolas Cage’s nameless Surfer, a visitor to the local Australian beaches where he spent his childhood. It’s Christmas, and he wants to take his teenage son (Finn Little) to ride the waves he grew up surfing before his ex-wife gets him for the rest of the holidays. But once they arrive at the “locals only” beach, they’re met with aggression from a group of bullies who call themselves the Bay Boys, led by the bronzed and enigmatic Scally (a deliciously sinister Julian McMahon), a cult-y figure who has positioned himself as a self-help guru for men who have grown too “soft.”
The Surfer at first appeals to them by explaining he grew up there, but when they mock him for leaving, he reveals that he’s coming back: he’s a very important businessman about to close a deal on the cliffside house that was his childhood home. Thus begins the vicious back-and-forth between Cage’s Surfer and the gang of macho men who slowly erode at the Surfer’s sense of self until he becomes disgustingly unrecognizable.
The Surfer is a sun-soaked exploitation film from director Lorcan Finnegan, whose sci-fi film Vivarium won the Cannes Film Festival Gan Foundation Support for Distribution award in 2019. But to see The Surfer, one would think Finnegan had been directing exploitation films all his career, with how grimy, and lewd, and bizarre it is. Every frame has a perpetual bronze haze over it, and every character looks sweaty and sticky.
But none is sweatier and stickier than Cage’s Surfer, who begins the film dressed as a respectable businessman (though why he would wear a suit to the beach boggles the mind), and ends with him caked in dirt, matted in sweat, and covered with (likely infected) injuries sustained from his psychological battle with the Bay Boys.
It starts with the aggressive confrontation on the beach, in which the Bay Boys intimidate the Surfer’s son. The Surfer takes his son back home, but, inexplicably, returns to the beach — he has a score to settle. Things quickly escalate, as the Surfer’s surfboard, his shoes, his phone, and eventually, his car, all disappear — and no one else on the beach seems to know where they went or remember who he was before. His identity is slowly getting stripped away, he realizes, as he starts to become indistinguishable from the homeless vagrant who lives in the carpark where the Surfer has set up base.
Scally and the Bay Boys approach...
As the Surfer’s transformation takes place over the course of the film, Cage throws himself whole-hog into the role, putting himself through every kind of excruciating torment imaginable. As the merciless Australian sun beats down on him (his only shelter is his battery-drained car, then, the vagrant’s car), he suffers from heat exhaustion — Cage conveys this by spending the entire movie panting out of his open mouth, his teeth constantly showing as if in a crazed Cheshire smile. He loses his shoes and immediately steps on glass, bandaging it up with a piece of his shirt. He loses his wallet and is forced to dig through trash for food or drink out of a puddle of water on the road. He finds a rat scurrying through the vagrant’s car and wrestles with eating, before stuffing it in his pocket (in a move that will have a gross payoff later). Cage is utterly deranged throughout — his “respectable” businessman at the start of the film was already a little left of center, so it didn’t take much of a push to turn him into the raving lunatic he becomes. Still, there’s always a great joy in seeing Cage go ham on an unhinged performance, and the actor proves that even this long into his career, he can do crazy like no one else.
And just when you think you can’t get any more mileage out of torturing Nicolas Cage, The Surfer takes a turn for the psychedelic. Finnegan constantly proves that he has a strong grasp of the visual language of an exploitation film, and keeps its trippy turn within the realm of the genre — upping the heat haze that seems to penetrate every frame of the film, and embedding us in the Surfer’s crazed mind with wacky hallucinations and dreamy visions of the most tragic day of his childhood on this beach, when he discovered his father. The film’s increasingly surreal arc seems to suggest that it will all come full circle for the Surfer, that he is doomed to repeat his father’s mistakes, or just become another vagrant living in a beach carpark.
Nicolas Cage and Julian McMahon’s psychological standoff is the highlight of the movie.
It’s heady, ambiguous stuff, and it’s not even the most potent commentary that The Surfer has to say. Scally and the Bay Boys, whose torture of the Surfer is both in-your-face and invisible, come to represent a kind of performative masculinity that the Surfer is internally struggling with: how can you be a man in this day and age? How do you prove yourself in this kind of dog-eat-dog battle of wills? Their show of their alpha-male superiority is over the top and brutal, and the Surfer resists it, before finally breaking down in the face of their brute-force bullying.
But though it briefly plumbs greater depths in regards to toxic masculinity and identity, The Surfer is, first and foremost, an exploitation B-movie to the utmost. It’s nasty, it’s mean, and it’s really, really gross. Sometimes it coasts along on the strength of a truly deranged Nic Cage performance, but maybe that’s all you want out of a movie like this.
