The Surfer (2024) – Review

Quick Thoughts: 

• Grade – B+
• Between Mandy, Color out of Space, Willy’s Wonderland, Longlegs, Arcadian, Dream Scenario and Prisoners of the Ghostland, Nicolas Cage has appeared in some wonderful genre films since 2016.
• I’d love to see a series of films featuring Cage having a terrible time in a parking lot.
• Director Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium, The Surfer) loves trapping potential home buyers in a remote location.
• The usage of colors is excellent. 

The best way to describe director Lorcan Finnegan’s latest film is that it features Nicolas Cage having a terrible time in a parking lot. The almost single-location film features another fun descent into madness for Cage who is no stranger to losing his mind for cinema. Between The Wicker Man, Mandy, Dream Scenario, Pig, and Color Out of Space, It’s fun watching the world attempting to squash him. Cage is one of cinema’s all-time great sufferers because you simultaneously feel bad for him as he suffers, but you kind of enjoy when a barefoot Cage steps on glass after getting a flat white coffee dumped on him. 

The Surfer revolves around a stressed-out surfer (Cage) who takes his son to an Australian beach that is near his childhood home. After years of waiting and working tirelessly to raise funds, the sprawling beach house he grew up in has finally gone back on the market and he plans on spending the entirety of his amassed wealth acquiring it. His goal is that the house will help him reunite with his estranged wife (who wants him to sign their divorce papers) and son, whom he wants to spend more time with. The plan of the beach trip is for his son to see the beautiful house while waiting to catch an Indian Ocean wave. Before they can get in the water, they are stopped by local surfers led by a well-tanned dude with comically white teeth named Scally (Julian McMahon), who won’t allow them to surf the waves. This sets off a chain of events involving stolen surfboards, towed cars, dead phone batteries, and the consumption of dirty bathroom sink water. 

The local police are no help, so the surfer lingers around the parking lot waiting for the perfect moment to retrieve his stolen surfboard (which never comes) From there, everything goes wrong as the single water fountain in the area is covered with dog poop, and the only person who is nice to him is a photographer (Miranda Tapsell) who helps him hold on to what’s left of his sanity. 

You can almost feel Cage’s brain boiling as he drifts around the Australian parking lot looking for food, water and anybody who will listen to him. Finnegan and DP Radzek Ladczuk add a nice layer of hard light which adds to the sun-baked atmosphere that pays homage to the sun-baked worlds of epic Ozploitation films Wake in Fright and Walkabout. The use of colors is excellent as the rusty orange buildings, faded yellow memories and red hoodie that Scally wears work wonders for the overall aesthetic. Scally’s red hoodie helps him give off an evil Jesus vibe (which the director intended), and it pairs well with his absurd tan (and whiter-than-white teeth) that took 40 minutes to apply each shooting day. 

Influenced by movies like The Swimmer (1968) and After Hours (1985), The Surfer is a classic “guy has a rough go of it” experience and it was an inspired idea to cast Cage as the guy who has a rough go of it. In an interview with Empire Magazine, Cage said that he listened to the House of Pain song “Jump Around” to let his “inner-caveman” out during the production – and it’s a joy watching his evolution from a stressed-out businessman to a raspy-voiced dehydrated guy with chapped lips and stomach pains caused by dirty water. It would be a shame to spoil how it ends, just know that the film explores toxic masculinity, crushed dreams, and successful stubbornness.