Nicolas Cage as a surfer sounds like a perfect premise and for the most part, The Surfer is. But you will always want to get in fights with Australian locals while watching it.
The Lorcan Finnegan film introduces us to a man (Cage) who has gone back to his childhood home in Australia. He moved to the United States when he was young (so sorry, Cage is not doing an Australian accent) and he wants to buy the home his father had so that he can share the beach with his young son. But what he is met with is a trippy look at localism, toxic masculinity, and the lengths one will go to spend time with their child (on their own terms).
The Surfer really is out there but in a fun and interesting way. You get to see this man refuse to leave a beach not because he is stuck there (he is eventually stuck there though) but because he is too determined to prove that he is right in this situation. Scally (Julian McMahon) leads something of a cult on the beach. It is a bunch of men who are taught they must suffer to surf. Women are not banned but we do not see any in the film.
For most of the film, Cage is just wandering around and being gaslit by those people who are local to the beach. The man at the coffee shop pretends like he didn’t steal his watch and lock his phone away and they take his car away from him, forcing him to live in a homeless man’s car and drink bad water. At one point, he tries to eat a rat.
All in the name of manliness.
It’d be easy to make a movie like this less than. It could easily just be a bunch of men being gross to each other without any other context to it. But what I think does work about The Surfer is that Cage is trying to fix his relationship with his son and he can seemingly only focus on buying the house to do that. His idea is that the house will fix his problems.
That is, in a lot of ways, a very “manly” way of thinking. Oh if I buy this thing or if I get money for this, everything will be okay. I’ve watched my father go through the same thought process. But that storyline mixed with the cult of McMahon makes The Surfer just a bit more than a psychedelic trip to the beach.
The film does drag at times with the repetitive nature of Cage’s storyline weighing on you but that is also part of the deal with this movie. You feel the time that he is stuck on the beach with no hope and it leads to a pretty satisfying conclusion by the end.
Overall, The Surfer falls into one of Cage’s more iconic of films and it is an interesting retrospective of his career in the last few years. But be warned, you will want to fight people on his behalf.
Published: Mar 12, 2025 12:50 pm