A film that rivals George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road and Furiosa in terms of how it turns Australia into even more of a stiflingly hot hellscape than it already is, The Surfer is a film less watched than it is endured. In every shot, you can practically feel the heat rising off the screen, melting the brains of the characters and maybe even yours in the process. Throw in the always-committed Nicolas Cage (who gives his best leading performance since the poetic PNW wonder Pig) is a man who just wants to surf — but who's being stopped by what seems like an entire universe that hates him — and you have a mesmerizing nightmare of a film. Even as it hazily stumbles about the remote beach setting and can get a little tangled up in itself along the way, there's no shaking free of the sweaty, often surreal, and increasingly stressful vibe that it creates. You hope for relief in the serene blue waters, but The Surfer just keeps ratcheting up the heat.
Directed by Lorcan Finnegan, who previously made the similarly confined and suffocating Vivarium, it all kicks off with Cage's unnamed man taking a drive to a beach with his son. We learn the troubled patriarch has a personal connection to the place, with fragments about a tragedy surrounding his family getting increasingly cut to as he unravels. Now, he hopes to buy a pricey house to be able to restore what he has lost. However, before he can take his son out surfing on the water to show him the best view of the structure, they're intimidated by a cultish group led by the menacing Scally (an excellent Julian McMahon), who will spend the rest of the film tormenting Cage's character. As he desperately tries to close on the house, futilely believing this will save him, he'll lose his possessions and pieces of his mind until he crumbles before us.
This could sound like it's Cage just being superficially "crazy" for the sake of it, as films like the putrid attempt at parody The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent have sometimes reduced him to, but this is far more interesting than that. The actor, while often pigeonholed into being a meme in reductive online chatter rather than someone committed to their craft, is not just being wild without any layers to it. Over the course of the film, he descends through desperation, anger, fear, and, in the surprising ending, emerges on the other side by finding notes of grace amid the chaos. At every torturous turn, we fully buy into the portrait Cage creates of a man losing his entire sense of self.
Though painting on a relatively small canvas where we don't ever leave the beach, the film benefits greatly from the vibrant, frequently hallucinogenic colors created by cinematographer Radek Ladczuk (who previously did remarkable work on films like The Babadook and The Nightingale), which give everything a heightened sensibility. As Cage's character suffers through trial after trial, losing access to food, water, and sanity, the fact that he doesn't leave is the point. It's less about taking things literally than it is about embracing the way the film is an unrelenting snapshot of obsession. While it gestures toward ideas about masculinity and the destruction men can inflict on themselves, it doesn't spell any of the things out as much as it represents this havoc visually. It isn't as insightful as one would hope for, but it also isn't afraid to shift into being a trashy exploitation film where the world's saddest dad makes a man eat a rat. What holds it together — for all the ways the characters maniacally laugh as you recoil at the nightmare unfolding before you — is how The Surfer never once blinks. No matter how bright the sun beating down may get, it's like the piercing stare of Cage himself: unsettling yet oddly brilliant.
The Surfer
Rated R
Directed by Lorcan Finnegan
Starring Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon
