You take your car to work, I'll take my board

THE SURFER

2025

Directed by Lorcan Finnegan

Written by Thomas Martin

Spoilers: moderate

The Surfer knows what it wants to be but often, in any given stretch, doesn't seem like it knows what it's actually doing.  I cannot say if this must be the hallmark of its director Lorcan Finnegan, though from what I've heard of in his filmography, there's a better-than-even chance that he is exactly such a proponent of the last decade's unlikeable trend of movies that prioritize being "about" something at the expense of any other quality (he directed 2019's Vivarium which is in all likelihood perfectly fine, and features in Jesse Eisenberg an actor who bats somewhere approaching 1.000 at that kind of "having themes and engaging in the discourse" project, but it's hard not to look at its synopsis and just say "oh, boy, here we go").  It could, on the other hand, be its screenwriter, Thomas Martin, only two feature screenplays into his career and still shaking out the sillies, grabbing at every single concept he was interested in and then stuffing them into a 91 minute script regardless of whether they were germane, while Finnegan subsequently neglected to finesse that script into any suitably pointed shape.  (I'll also entertain the possibility that being very inexpensive might have something to do with it.)  Meanwhile, it does, of course, labor under a burden: if it knows what it wants to be but sometimes isn't sure how to, it also knows that, as a commercial endeavor, it would behoove it to look like what it isn't—even when it doesn't want to—and so Martin has determined upon a plot, a structure, and even a setting (and Finnegan sure as hell cast a lead, but I could keep listing shit like "the would-be iconic title" and "the Tarantinian throwback font that the title is in") that are pretty good at having the movie that contains them be mistaken for something else, and precisely because of that it's going to be wonky and weird at doing the things Martin and Finnegan actually wanted to get out of it.

This is possibly being more charitable than I should be: what they wanted, to be slightly less abstract about it, was a movie about toxic masculinity represented by a surfer cult—somebody had just watched Point Break, I guess—with its protagonist getting himself bedeviled by those selfsame toxically masculine surfers, but, indeed, a protagonist who is also himself wrestling with his own unresolved resentments and nostalgic attachments and unexpressed gendered rages, so isn't our hero really looking into a mirror?; and, armed with these ideas for ideas, they then just sort of doodled around over the course of most of those 91 minutes, and not for the most part in particularly cogent ways.  At all points, however, what it's going to feel like is Mandy won't fucking start, an impression that's magnified by the bizarre, overheated photographic and directorial choices, this being an impression that you really do have to consider more-or-less deliberately conveyed, rather than just some leak inside my brain, when that lead I mentioned is Nicolas fuckin' Cage, and all you ever want for the whole movie is for him to just start making these Goddamned surf Nazis die already.  Oh, audience—you've been implicated!  Swell.

Now, just because a movie has an arguably dishonorable complexion (and let's be clear: an intentionally disingenuous marketing campaign) doesn't mean it isn't a success on its own terms, and we don't even have to leave Nic Cage's filmography for such a thing, when 2021's Pig is right there, being a slow and somber movie about eternal mourning sold as "Nic Cage is John Wick, but with a pig," though the thought process that seems to have resulted in The Surfer, "let's make Mandy and Pig but simultaneously," is alien and alienating to me.  I am, even so, compelled to call The Surfer a success: it looks too fucking great not to.

Or rather, it looks horrid, but in really well-calculated and awesome ways.  Shot by Radek Ladczuk (and not to give him all the credit, he did so obviously after being thoroughly briefed by Finnegan on exactly what he needed out of him), the first thing is that it is gruesomely sunny and saturated, and in its nighttime scenes just gruesomely saturated; but it's the daytimes that first concern us, and the manner in which it's been tilted towards summer colors beyond any possibility of a fun day at the beach, orange and teal color grading essentially turned into a weapon so that on a basic level everything would feel roiling and sweatily disgusting and even unfit for human survival (it is, in fact, close to what I wish the climate-apocalyptic daytimes of Reminiscence had looked like, solving my only problem with that movie), even if the filmmakers weren't constantly busy punching that up further with post-production distortion and haze, giving it a kind of psychedelic cast that jibes well with the sort of "our fuzzy idea of a low-budget 70s movie" look that this movie's going for.  This really gets overcooked in the flashbacks, or fantasies, or fugues, that continually stab their way through the film, attending the mental and emotional deterioration of our poor protagonist (Cage is never named and can be identified only as what the credits call him, "the surfer," and this can be—you guessed—occasionally awkward).  These, in turn, are just a special case of the film's montage, which is across the whole runtime most diligent and incredibly effortful—denotative synonyms with opposite connotations, yes, and I mean every word—at gesturing at a breakdown, while packing in cutaways full of weird animal life (it's set in Australia) that continually insist upon an elemental and inevitable awakening of atavistic violence.

And don't let me overlook the nighttime scenes, either: the parking lot above the beach that's actually our major location is lit by sickening Mountain Dew green lamps, and when we do get down to the beach, the "moonlight" is this deep and cone-vibrating blue, and somehow either an unfiltered blue or something punched up with digital coloring tools used for good for once, because it coexists with some very reddish-orange fire, and in this live-action film somehow the closest comparison I have at hand is the color style in "Savages," the musical number in Pocahontas.  Throw in some 40s intoxication montage here, or an absolutely tremendous final frame there, that's just Cage's face looking up at—well, I won't tell you, but it's nothing but the actor's ambivalent face in an endless field of teal—and yeah, it's a great looking movie, a real barnburner of technical skill applied with not a whole lot of money or resources, mainly just this beach.

And it's in service to a film that knows what its first act and third act have to be in order to achieve the counter-intuitive goals it's set out for itself, goals that are not, I suppose, actually unsatisfying, but neither fully satisfying the desires that the form has psychologically conditioned you to desire—which means that, in fairness, Finnegan has made a smart little intellectual argument by way of cinema—but those first and third acts, combined, aren't even half the movie and they might not be one-third of the movie, so most of it is that second act that, like I said, does not know what to do with itself.

You may not think so, but I have pretty much summarized the plot, but it is possible that you, dear reader, could benefit from a clearer picture.  So: our surfer (Cage, as indicated) has come back home to a small community roughly analogous to Yallingup, Western Australia, where it was shot,* and while I hear you objecting, I really wish you wouldn't, because it's thanks to people like you that Martin felt compelled to shoehorn in an explanation about how American-accented Cage could be an Australian citizen in this movie, and, speaking for myself, I never fucking cared.  This Christmas week, he's brought his son (Finn Little, demonstrating why young men ought not to be allowed to participate in hairstyle trends without expert supervision), and there's a somewhat hectoring tone to how they're gonna really enjoy surfing on his ancestral beach, and we'll notice how they mention not living with one another, which is because the surfer's going through a divorce, not of his choosing; but right now he's pretty pumped, pumped enough to deliver a pretty shamanic monologue about waves as the opening lines of the film (it's Cagian enough they feel the urge to lampshade it a bit immediately thereafter, not unhumorously, and Cagian enough that it's sampled during the end credits music).  He's pumped, anyway, because the other reason he's arrived today is to purchase his childhood home.  Unfortunately, they are almost immediately accosted upon arrival by locals, basically a gang under the sway of one Scally (Julian McMahon), who have that xenophobic sense of proprietorship that sometimes accrues to local surfers jealously guarding their spots, and despite the surfer's protestations that he is a local, erstwhile or not, after his toughs put a scare into the surfer and his son, it's Scally who puts a friendlier face on a message that remains, "fuck off."  So the surfer takes his kid home, but he returns, as he does have business here, though his purpose, obviously, is to obsess over Scally's gang to the point of dysfunction and long after it's clear it's only going to lead to suffering.

Uncomplicated, which isn't by default bad, but either way that's basically it, and just for starters, the trailer is strongly suggesting a papa bear or bloody vengeance sort of thing with the son that, as you can see, is not manifested in the film whatsoever (they do steal the surfer's board, which matters for about one scene), though Finn does eventually have some further participation in the film, in keeping with the way I mentioned that the movie has first and third acts and not a second.  The fundamental thing that's making The Surfer misshapen, I think, is its insistence on being a single location and also more-or-less real-time thriller (it's sort of real-time, anyway, and would benefit from being moreso; the surfer spends about 60 hours in this parking lot), this having been perceived as being better for its allegorical scheme—nuanced or just addled is hard to tell—and for it to drift into anti-realist fabulism; the short version is, I think you could probably do the movie with the surfer having already bought his childhood home and moving in and it would be cleaner, but then you wouldn't have what Finnegan and Martin have decided will fill the middle hour of their film, which is somehow a survival thriller in remote-but-still-21st-century-and-suburban Australia, powered by a locality-spanning conspiracy to back Scally up and persecute our man.  Hence the other fundamental thing making The Surfer misshapen: it always feels like its instinct is to run full-tilt into rural horror, akin to a Texas Chainsaw Massacre or a Wicker Man—there are many shades of rural horror—or, you know, a Mandy, and for that it needs, and lo and behold it has, a freakshow cult led by a charismatic whackjob who's all about [spin the flavor wheel] the mystical qualities of surfing; it channels this through a figure that's likewise a wealthy developer—that's what Scally is—which isn't so different than e.g. Lord Summersisle, but is also an oddly-blended Jordan Peterson/Andrew Tate-style manosphere influencer, who has located his cult in this town and bent the entire population to his will, which doesn't make sense because the latter two, like Scally in this regard, are Internet phenomena, not the isolated and quasi-incestuous local yokels' big wheel.

So the surfer eventually has his choices cut off, and is stranded (I mean, sort of), by means you may or may not entirely buy, but violence as such does not break out; it's a "survival thriller" or playing at one, but it's not, by design, playing at an action thriller, and that leaves Martin space to just... riff, I guess.  The big riff that nets Martin the most runtime is the bum (Nic Cassim) still marginally attached to this beach out of a personal vendetta against Scally, and this shows its hand very quickly, certainly no later than when the now Lexus-less surfer is obliged to start sleeping in the bum's own makeshift shelter, the busted-up broken-down ruin of his car, though I had an inkling much earlier; and I don't think I would have enjoyed The Surfer that was a weird metaphorical time travel movie much better, but I feel really quite hatefully misused by a movie that commits upwards of forty aggregate minutes of screentime to Cage rapidly decaying into a paranoid, ranting drifter no longer able to converse with anyone, and does this in pursuit of (and I'm going to recommend just reading these "spoiler" redactions) a total blind, just, like, complete filler bullshit, with intimations that Scally has been able to psychologically manipulate our hero into the delusion that he's stuck in a Goddamn time loop, not much of any of that having to do with the whole "divorced energy" thing except in a heinously abstract way, or with the seductive power of caveman masculinity (apparently even when it's being pitched in overintellectualized, jargonized word vomit**).  It has arguably less than nothing to do with those things by the time the movie decides it's done enough weird gonzo nonsense, and twisted itself back towards a more literalist series of events.

But then it does still have that cinematography, and while I can't tell you I was never bored, my eyes weren't and my ears weren't—it is further the case that this is a movie that, not so typically for the 2020s, genuinely cares about its score, Francois Tetaz's oft-ironic music dreamily contemplating all those glimmering seascapes just out of reach (not unlike the proverbial dream of a life that didn't come true, wouldn't you agree?), as well as a very good pair of central performances from Cage and McMahon alike, though naturally Cage is the draw and the show even if McMahon is good at being the kind of chummy threat that always works in movies like this, where the villain is basically invulnerable and so sees the hero mainly as an entertaining way to while away a few afternoons.  As for Cage, what we get is not ever particularly unified, as it probably could not be in this situation, but Cage is doing a fantastic job at executing a Cagian version of, not any of the above-named films or even a horror/thriller genre effort, but basically 1968's satirical fable The Swimmer, which is probably the main reason it's called The Surfer.  Shame it's mangling The Swimmer as much as any of its other influences, insofar as The Swimmer was a comedy with secret pathos built out of vignettes structured around the increasingly-dark whimsy of its hero swimming across his part of wealthy suburban Connecticut by way of its backyard swimming pools, which is to say it never spent long enough anywhere for its rather more numerous satirical ideas to grow stale, and for all that this fancies itself a very weird movie, you get the sense it knows in its heart that it's mostly just spinning its wheels all day long with only a handful of ideas, none of them thoroughly worked-out, and it's accordingly trying really, really hard to distract you from what kind of amounts to an absence of actual content.  Despite that, there's enough going on with the craft in service to an atmosphere, and I guess enough going on with the story, to generate a substantial vibe of fear and loathing, and middle-aged desperation, and a jagged emotional landscape with enough features courtesy Cage to get your bearings as you're marched through it; but no half-hearted compliment is likely to obscure the fact that the obvious, even objective single best moment in the whole film is just when it gives in and gives you a little taste of what you asked for, when Cage screams "EAT THE RAT."

Score: 6/10

*A place that's actually significantly cooler in the summer than, say, Pittsburgh, PA is; but let's not be so persnickety.

**Which is how I got reminded of Eisenberg, who starred in The Art of Self Defense, which did this very well, and you may have noticed how many really good movies The Surfer reminds me of, which is part of why it's so aggravating.