‘The Surfer’ Review: Nicolas Cage Rages Against Australian Bros in Psychedelic Thriller

Lorcan Finnegan’s psychedelic thriller The Surfer begins with the titular unnamed hero (Nicolas Cage) driving along a patch of Australian coastline while delivering a monologue about the existential importance of surfing. It’s a moment so perfectly in keeping with the public perception of Cage as a shamanistic, wild-man oddball that you can almost feel The Surfer winking at us. And that’s before the man jokingly admonishes his son (Finn Little) for not reacting more strongly to his “very best surfing-as-a-metaphor-for-life speech.”

After the surfer and his son are driven off the beach by a group of macho locals known as the Bay Boys, our hero spends the rest of the film angrily pacing the beachside carpark, locked in a stand-off with this band of burly bros. The surfer grew up riding these waves but moved to the U.S long ago and has returned to reclaim the house once owned by his grandfather. But while he still thinks of this place as “home,” the film is quick to emphasize all the bougie little things that now mark him as an outsider, zooming in accusatorily on his hands as they crank up the AC inside his shimmering Lexus or tap his smartphone to pay for another flat white.

Visually, The Surfer conjures the same sense of dreamy disorientation of Coralie Fargeat’s work. The soundtrack twinkles ethereally while the screen is filled with scorching sunlight and the camera always seems to be pressing in a little too close on things that are viscerally unpleasant. The film also explores gender issues with the same contempt for subtext or subtlety as The Substance. The Bay Boys, for one, are a horde of growling, grunting corporate warriors led by a thought leader type named Scally (Julian McMahon), who likes to wax lyrical about the need for modern men to reconnect with their animalistic nature. It’s a setup which allows The Surfer to provide some very loud, not particularly deep commentary on masculinity.

As the Bay Boys continue to terrorize the surfer, gradually stripping him of his status-signifying possessions—his watch, phone, and car—the Australian bros slowly return him to a state of nature. And between their torments and the oppressive heat, the surfer gradually loses his grip on reality, with the film leaning more and more heavily into its hazy, discordant visuals.

This sunbaked middle section goes on for too long, especially since it never really makes us question whether the surfer is anything other than the person we clearly saw him as at the start of the film. His ongoing feud with the Bay Boys never meaningfully escalates or reveals anything more interesting about their cultish group, so we’re just waiting for their stand-off to end.

But when The Surfer does break out of the sun-addled fugue state that marks its midsection, it delivers a gonzo finale that lets Cage rev himself up into his most manic, meme-able self: eyes popping, teeth bared, words exploding out of him in the most unexpected cadences. It’s like watching a pro wrestler pull out their signature move right at the end of a grueling match.

However, the power of this finale is undermined by the fact that it actually isn’t quite the end of the film. Thomas Martin’s script hems and haws, unable to decide whether to give us a show of bloody vengeance or an irony-tinged happily ever after, so it ends up giving us both, and the filmmakers don’t quite pull off either. Still, one of Cage’s frenzied outbursts contains a particular line reading that’s so utterly absurd and so sublimely Cage-ish that The Surfer manages to ride out on a wave of good vibes that almost makes up for all the preceding choppy surf.