By Grace Russell
Nicolas Cage has made a career from his highly entertaining scenery chewing. He follows a performance style he calls “Nouveau Shamanic” – an exaggerated form of method acting where he acts according to the character’s impulses. This allows for the wild, unpredictable outbursts his characters are known for.
Cage films are also usually about masculinity: its worst excesses, the parameters restricting it, and what ennobling versions of it might look like.
The Surfer, a new Australian feature film from Irish director Lorcan Finnegan, leans right into masculinity as a theme.
Our unnamed protagonist (Cage) is returning to his former Australian home from the United States. He is newly divorced, and trying to buy a beachside property to win back his family.
He takes his teenage son (Finn Little) for a surf near the property, but they are run off by an unfriendly pack of locals.
Returning alone to the beachside car park to make some calls, he is besieged there over the next several days by the same gang. They are led by a terrifying middle-aged Andrew Tate-esque influencer, Scally (Julian McMahon), who runs the beach like a combination of a frat bro party and wellness retreat.
The protagonist’s fast descent into dishevelled, dehydrated delirium as the group’s hazing escalates, fuels much of the first two acts.
Fish out of water
It is impossible to think of an actor other than Cage who could make a character like this so enjoyable to watch.
From the first moments, he seems pathetic: giving his uninterested teenage son metaphorical speeches about surfing, losing arguments on the phone with his broker and real estate agent, reeking of pomposity and desperation.
The sense of a man out of his depth is compounded by his Americanness contrasting with the particular brand of Australian masculinity the locals display. Both types are brash and entitled, but with entirely different ways of expressing it.
Cage’s distinctively American confidence has no resistance to the terrifying switches of Australian masculinity from friendly to teasing to violent.
“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they hiss at him on first meeting, forcing him to retreat, cowed, to the car park, where he remains for most of the rest of the film.
The wide-open and the claustrophobic
What a stroke of genius it is to use this single location.
Filmed in Yallingup, Western Australia, The Surfer beautifully captures the natural surroundings, stunning views and shimmering heat of Australian coastal summer.
At the same time, a confined, interstitial semi-urban feature like a beachside car park feels so bleak and uninviting. The only amenities are an overpriced coffee cart, ancient payphone and a dingy toilet block.
As a film setting, it is both a spectacular wide-open vista and stiflingly claustrophobic – a perfect mechanism for The Surfer’s psychological horror.
It must have been attractive in getting the script funded as well. With such an affordable location, more of the budget would have been freed up for a big name like Cage.
A modern Wake in Fright
With its oppressive setting, overexposed orange and yellow light and grade, and a sweaty spiral into madness, The Surfer invites comparisons to Wake in Fright, Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 brutal depiction of Australian men and their drinking culture.
Both take place at Christmas and feature an antagonist who enjoys confidently explaining their dubious moral worldview to everyone. However, Wake in Fright’s horror lingers because we know the culture remains even after the hero escapes it. The Surfer struggles a little more in landing the ending.
For the mean, violent, misogynistic villains to be defeated, it would be unsatisfying for Cage to stoop to their level. This means – without spoiling too much – Cage remains an oddly passive character throughout the film, while others perform the avenging actions.
The only way the protagonist’s masculinity can be resurrected as upright, ethical and empowering is for the character to literally turn his back on the vengeance we’ve been waiting for him to deliver.
It’s not that the film has an inarticulate grasp of its own politics, but more that the otherwise terrific script by Thomas Martin feels written into a difficult corner.
A blast along the way
I don’t want to imply that this ending means The Surfer isn’t an absolute blast along the way. A lot of the fun is in anticipating each dreadful humiliation – and it somehow turning out worse than you could have expected.
A spilled coffee leads to drinking recycled wastewater which leads to chewing on a dead rat, and we still haven’t reached the lowest rung on the ladder of indignities that Cage’s character suffers.
In less skilled hands this could feel nasty or gross, but the hallucinatory quality of Finnegan’s direction makes it feel almost sublime. And Cage’s pleading, groaning, sobbing and gibbering feel believable and relatable.
The pathos works – and it’s pretty funny too.
