What kind of Nicolas Cage fan are you? Maybe you like the deliberate, soulful Cage of Pig or Adaptation. Or maybe you prefer the manic energy of Mega-Cage, as in Mandy or The Wicker Man. And of course, there’s the entire spectrum of performance in between. But with his latest, The Surfer, we have a movie that indulges a bit of both poles, a vaguely hallucinatory study of a guy experiencing a total breakdown of his privilege and therefore his psyche, probably perfectly pitched for Cage.
Here he plays an unnamed fellow, so for our purposes we’ll just call him Surfer. We meet him arguing with his real estate broker. Australian by birth, he’s lived in America for most of his life, and he’s returned to his homeland to try to purchase his grandfather’s gorgeous cliffside house. He’d better hope that works out for him, because the local tough guys, a bunch of howl-at-the-moon man’s men who call themselves the Bay Boys, refuse to let him surf. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here!” they sneer, and that’s just the beginning of the unraveling of Surfer’s self-actualization.
As the indignities mount and Surfer’s aggressive, Ugly American-style dismissal of the equally abrasive locals escalates, Cage is allowed to go from merely blustery to full-on mania. He becomes increasingly more disheveled, his phone dies, he’s baking in the sun, his car goes missing. And before long, the only cop in sight treats him like a vagrant: he’s begging for scraps and drinking out of puddles, insisting that someone recognize and rescue him. Is his reality coming apart? Which is to say, it seems for a while like The Surfer is pointing its way toward some psychological twist, but then, eventually, that’s all abandoned for something a bit more nebulous.
The Bay Boys are led by a grinning, macho asshole who calls himself Scally (Julian McMahon), and he runs his little gang like a beachside Jordan Peterson, spouting wolf-in-the-woods platitudes like “Before you can surf, you must suffer.” Are we explaining to our Surfer that desire is suffering? That his masculinity has been thwarted by privilege? Ultimately, The Surfer doesn’t seem to care about that stuff at all, opting instead for a stylish, vaguely psychically penetrative freakout thriller. In this, then, the film’s Australian roots and location can’t help but bring to mind the nightmarish acid trips of great Ozploitation classics like Wake in Fright or The Long Weekend, and while those are richer texts to be sure, they are instructive as to the simmering, supernatural-feeling, and spooky texture viewers will ultimately find in The Surfer.
DIRECTOR: Lorcan Finnegan; CAST: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Miranda Tapsell, Nicholas Cassim; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions; IN THEATERS: May 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 43 min.
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