The Surfer is not deep enough to justify its dramatic cinematography, soundtrack and tension-building, and not wild enough to join Australia’s menagerie of exploitation B-movies.
I’m unsure if we can, or should, call The Surfer an Australian movie. On one hand, we hear Aussie accents, it was shot on location in Yallingup, 250 km south of Perth, it created 150 Australian jobs, and it pays homage to the notorious ‘Ozploitation’ movies of the ‘70s like Wake in Fright and The Last Wave. On the other hand, the film has no redeemable Australian characters, top-bills Nicolas Cage, was written and directed by Irishmen, and wasn’t even edited in Australia. A clumsy narrative and a lack of Aussies at the fore of production mean that The Surfer prevails more as a boring swipe at a stereotypical Australia rather than a takedown of xenophobia and corporate hypermasculinity.
The opening scene plonks viewers in sun-soaked Western Australia, where a corporate Cage and his reluctant son (Finn Little) pull into a parking lot in a pristine Lexus. The scene is idyllic, save for a car-dwelling vagrant mumbling about his lost son and murdered dog. Cage takes a few heated calls; he’s desperate to close the deal on his childhood home overlooking ‘Lunar Beach’, as he clings to sunny memories of carving barrels before his family fell apart and he moved to America. Abrupt flashbacks (or flashforwards?) to a suited corpse in the shallows warn that this spot has some bad juju, but our unnamed protagonist is determined to surf with his son and eye up his waterfront prey.
The pair head for the water, shimmering drone shots and swelling strings evoking the mythical, nostalgic pull of the Big Blue. They’re about to reach the water when a few wetsuit-wearing groms square up to them, testosterone pumping. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here.” Expletives are thrown — it’s inspiring to hear the word ‘seppo’ on the big screen — and Cage is shunned back to where he came from: the parking lot.
It’s here that we spend the next hour and a half observing a parable of entitlement. An increasingly delirious Cage fixates on making it to the surf, a goal intertwined with snapping up his childhood home. He loses his phone and his car, his useless son disappears, and Cage is relentlessly pushed around by various archetypes of Aussie gronk (hipster, eshay, grom, overbearing real estate agent, corporate retreat shaman).
Nicolas Cage has been experiencing a true late-career renaissance, with seemingly all of his movies in the past seven years having been lauded as his great return to cinema. ‘Not that we went anywhere’, as he tells himself in 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. It’s hard to say whether our collective (often ironic) obsession with Cage is the result of disbelief that he still gets gigs or a real attraction to his melodramatic style. Whatever the appeal, Cage is leaning into it, going all-out for roles like the titular chalk-faced Satanist in Longlegs (2024), a grief-stricken truffle hunter in Pig (2021), and as himself in The Unbearable Weight.
Alienation hangs over the Lunar Beach parking lot like the stench of a beach bin in summer. Ominous zooms reminiscent of Kubrick give the surfers’ floating congregations a sinister air. The usually meditative ring of cicadas is dialed up to 11, building a distinctly Australian tension. The sun climbs and a feverish, dishevelled Cage starts to look eerily similar to the parking lot bum.
The film toys with an environmental message about heat-induced delirium, but unimaginative dialogue and the strange decision to pre-empt virtually every narrative event with a flash-forward make Cage’s descent a dull watch. Crazed camera angles and beautiful surf shots (low-hanging fruit for an Aussie audience) are not enough to distract us from asking why the hell The Surfer doesn’t just leave? The writing would seem stronger if Cage had left the parking lot, even if he came back with a fresh suit, or a machete, or something. Despite this, there are some exhilarating moments of insanity, such as a scene involving a dead rat in the surf which had the whole cinema cackling.
The territorial locals that run Lunar Beach call themselves the ‘Bay Boys’, an obvious reference to the notorious Bra Boys that staked claim over beaches around Maroubra in the ‘00s. This attempt to critique xenophobia in Australian surf culture, or provincialism more generally, falls flat given that the victim is Nicolas Cage, the quintessential annoying American, and the movie is directed and written by Irish people. The Surfer also shoots for a critique of contemporary hypermasculinity with an ocean baptism where Bay Boys’ head honcho Scally (Julian McMahon) explains that “You have to know you’re worthless before you feel priceless” and that every man has a red-blooded predator inside him. McMahon is fantastic as the venomous gatekeeper of this cult of manhood. A mix of Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate and every Billy Zane role ever, his performance offers a depth that most of the film’s characters lack.
The movie’s climax is a scramble for sincerity after an hour and a half of chaotic reverie. Its final, highly dramatic minutes are preceded by a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas-esque trip sequence and a lurch in pace. Finnegan attempts an inter-generational resolution that would have hit a bit harder if The Surfer’s son wasn’t such an absent wet sock.
The Surfer takes aim at the corporate manosphere and inherited hypermasculinity, glancing ever so briefly at climate change and traditional land ownership. Like someone that’s spent several days in the sun, it’s a little bleary and not making a tonne of sense, but it’ll make you laugh a few times.
The Surfer is in cinemas now.
