The Surfer
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: R
Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Finn Little, Julian McMahon
Writer: Thomas Martin
Director: Lorcan Finnegan
Here’s a little inside-baseball tidbit about film critics: Most of us can’t wait for the next Nicolas Cage movie to come out, because there’s just no telling what that guy is going to do next.
By my reckoning, over the past decade Cage, among the screen’s most accomplished actors, has headlined just one or two big-budget flicks. But in that time, he has played a father whose son is kidnapped at a Halloween carnival (Pay the Ghost), a construction worker visited by God (Army of One), an alpaca breeder battling a space alien (Color Out of Space) and a man who inexplicably starts appearing in the dreams of everyone on Earth (Dream Scenario).
In other words, Nicolas Cage does whatever the hell Nicolas Cage wants. Sometimes the result is fantastic (Pig); other times it’s deliriously unhinged (Willy’s Wonderland).
No matter: Whatever Cage does, he’s never, ever going to be boring. And it is, frankly, just plain delightful to watch a guy having so much fun doing something he clearly loves, completely on his own terms.
Currently, Cage seems to be going through a Midnight Movie phase, often turning up in excruciatingly focused tales of peril — be they supernaturally inspired or sparked by indescribably evil human villains (In the case of last year’s Longlegs, the bad guy was played by Cage himself).
In The Surfer, Cage plays the well-meaning — if a tad tightly-wound — businessman father of a teenage boy (Yellowstone’s Finn Little). All seems fine as they pull into the parking lot of an idyllic Australian surfing beach — the very same one where The Surfer (whose name is never mentioned) caught waves as a kid.
But a pall of turmoil hangs over the outing. The Surfer is going through a difficult divorce with his son’s mother, and the boy is more than a little uncomfortable with Dad. An air of desperation taints The Surfer’s attempts to relate to the boy. All he wants right now is to share these breakers with his increasingly distant child and to show him, from out in the water, his own childhood home on a bluff overlooking the ocean — a place that he is at this moment in negotiations to buy. (It’s complicated, but The Surfer was born in Australia and, for reasons later revealed, moved to the U.S. as a teenager, which explains why The Surfer talks like Nicolas Cage and not like Russell Crowe.)
It doesn’t take long for things to go south: The moment the pair set foot on the beach, they are confronted by what can only be described as a viper’s nest of aggressive middle-aged surfers, one of whom gets into Dad’s face and hisses, “Not from here, can’t surf here.” (It comes out sounding something like “Not from hee, cahnt sarf hee.” Future streaming viewers will benefit greatly from reaching for the closed caption button.)
Father and son beat a hasty retreat, but this being a Nic Cage action movie, we know full well The Surfer is not going to let this humiliation roll off his back. He’ll be back. For a lot more humiliation.
After dropping his son at the home of his soon-to-be-ex, The Surfer returns to the beach, obsessed with asserting his Right to Surf, which for all I know is guaranteed in the Australian constitution. For days and nights, from a beach overlook, he observes the weird rituals of the surfer buddies: They seem under the thrall of a tall, gray-haired surfing guru (Julian McMahon, Fantastic Four’s Dr. Doom) who sits atop a wooden Tiki platform, laughing approvingly as his minions casually beat up unsuspecting trespassers (including, at one point, The Surfer) and frequently abuse each other in grossly inappropriate horseplay including, but not limited to, branding each other with hot irons.
The days slip by, and The Surfer pays a progressively deeper price for his sunbaked vigil. His surf board is stolen. Followed by his shoes, followed by his phone, followed by his car. His only drinking water source is fouled in the most disgusting way imaginable. The local cops are no help, and may be in cahoots with the surfers from Hell.
Through it all, as his world is stripped down one possession, one shred of dignity at a time, The Surfer descends into a mounting mixture of rage and madness. After some time, he — and we — begin to wonder whether or not he ever had a car. Or a son. Or even shoes. He wanders the parking lot, begging terrified beachgoers to let him use their phones, explaining in a raspy, sunstroke-weakened voice that he needs to call his broker about a big real estate deal he’s trying to finalize. My favorite Nicolas Cage moment: Literally starving, The Surfer picks up a passing porcupine and prepares to take a bite out of it. When a passer-by gasps in horror, The Surfer glares at them in exasperation and inquires, “What?”
Cage is the master of the perfectly calibrated descent into desperation. In his best movies — Leaving Las Vegas, The Weather Man, Pig — he embodies men who, locked in a death spiral, keep telling themselves, “I’ll endure this affront, but nothing more.” They continue to do so, one indignity after another, until at last the time comes for a freakout of such monumental proportions there may be little to no oxygen left in the theater for both Cage and his audience.
Inevitably, that moment comes in The Surfer, but the resulting wild-eyed, teeth-bared rampage is remarkably abbreviated as our hero finds himself momentarily buying into the smog of toxic masculinity that has, until this moment, made his life a living hell.
It doesn’t last, of course. In the end The Surfer learns the value of keeping his cool in the face of adversity of the most extreme kind. Which makes The Surfer unlike lots of other Nicolas Cage movies. Then again, as I said, you never really know what Nic Cage is going to do next.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now
