The Surfer is an effective movie, filled with a visceral and tactile aesthetic that will leave you squirming in your seat. However, once the movie is over, the mood evaporates. It never gets under your skin and sticks to your insides.
Still, Lorc Finnegan has made a gorgeous, sumptuous, and for the most part, riveting film about toxic masculinity. Finnegan has taken cues from directors like Caroline Fargeat and made his psychological thriller a bright colorful scuzzy experience that works so well it’s a shame it doesn’t quite hit the mark. But man that first hour flies by and then it starts having to solve the plot.
The script by Thomas Martin works best when it plunges Nic Cage’s unnamed character, merely known as The Surfer, into a dreamlike hell. The Surfer plays like gangbusters when Finnegan and Martin play with reality and shove their fingers into the character’s psyche pulling out the bits and pieces of his buried trauma and anxieties. It all starts to wear a little then when they try and tie up plot threads.
Martin’s story is pretty straightforward and for a long while the success of The Surfer comes from its simplicity. Cage’s Surfer brings his son, known only as The Kid (Finn Little) to the beach to do some surfing. The beach is part of a gated community in which the Surfer is trying to buy a house. The house, it turns out, is actually his, he used to live there, before a tragedy forced his family to move.
What follows is a throwback to 70s psychological thrillers with a hint of Troma’s Surf Nazis Must Die. The would-be ‘surf nazis’ are led by charismatic local businessman Scally (Julian McMahon). Scally is a beach bum version of Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson, denouncing the stoic attitudes of their forefathers while pushing their own brand of macho bullshit.
The result is a gang of tanned, glistening, psychos who lack empathy for anyone who isn’t one of them. All the while Scally wears a genial “boys will be boys” smile even as his eyes shimmer with a menace rooted in modern “dog eat dog” sensibilities. It’s a great set-up until Finnegan and Martin try to answer questions no one really cares about.
Cage, as usual, proves, for the umpteenth time, that he is a generational talent. His performance is central to the success of The Surfer. His willingness to humiliate himself for a part, the utter lack of vanity as his Surfer goes from Yuppie to a near starving, raving, madman haunting a parking lot is riveting.
In fact, there are times where it fells as if Cage is willing to go farther than the movie. Late in the movie, as the Surfer nears the end of his rope he spies a rat he killed earlier and comes close to eating it. Nic Cage eating a rat might be too much to handle for some, at the same time, it feels like The Surfer missed an opportunity.
Though it does pay off with Cage going ham on the surf nazis and shoves the dead rat into one of the surf nazi’s face screaming, “Eat the Rat! Eat the Rat!”. A moment that, even as someone who doesn’t think the film ultimately works, is worth seeing on the big screen, if only to see Cage’s bulging eyes and hear that shrieking voice as he beats down this bruiser of a surfer.
Finnegan uses Radek Ladczuk’s camera bring an hallucinatory beauty to the Australian beachfront. The colors in The Surfer are so vivid as to lend the movie a dreamlike quality. Intentional, as so much The Surfer feels like it takes place on the razor thin line between reality and a nightmarish hellscape.
An Irish-Australian production, the film uses Australia as a location but the cruelty of the characters feels positively American. The Surfer looks at toxic masculinity, the tribalism of it, and how the drive for so much of the cruelty we see stems from that old enemy, capitalism. Status, materialism, and a yearning for community drive the heart of The Surfer.
Finnegan paints the film like a sun-drenched fable. The world in The Surfer is an exaggerated reality, a community that reacts, often violently, to outsiders. It is in many ways a perfect encapsulation of modern reality.
The Surfer looks at how Cage’s character goes from having almost everything he almost ever wanted to losing almost everything. All of it is predictable, yet that doesn’t make it any less unnerving. But when Finnegan and Martin try to wrap things up, The Surfer falls apart.
My guess is that the film is a victim of the mindset that says the film must be over ninety minutes long or else it’s not a film. For there is a moment in The Surfer that is a perfect ending-but then just keeps going and going. Everything after this moment is nothing but pure plot-wank. Characters explain what really happened, revelations about the far-reaching tendrils of the community. The worst is the inclusion of a B-plot that provides an excellent character to parallel Cage’s Surfer but who ultimately brings with him a story the film tries to treat as something that needs resolution.
In other words, The Surfer is at its most hypnotic when it is merely exploring the depths Cage has sunk and will go to to get that damn house. The excavation of the Surfer’s identity as it connected to material things he owns, leaving him an empty vessel of nothing but pain and anguish is heart-wrenching. But when it turns its attention to the outside world and the lives of others whom we’ve barely grazed The Surfer sinks. Had Finnegan been content to ride the waves, he might have had something.
Images courtesy of Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions
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