The Surfer
Nic Cage hangs ten in awkward Ozploitation throwback.
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I’m a Nicolas Cage stan who’s also obsessed with Kathryn Bigelow’s “Point Break,” so you’d assume I’d be in the bag for Irish director Lorcan Finnegan’s “The Surfer” (in theaters beginning Friday, May 2) and to a certain extent I am … but Finnegan also seems to engage with cinema of agitation and/or discomfort (my review of his last film “Nocebo” here) and that ain’t really my jam.
Cage stars as our titular, nameless Surfer. He’s returned to the quaint Australian beach community where he grew up in hopes of buying his childhood home. He wants to paddle out into the surf with his son (Finn Little) to best get a look at the hilltop house. Before they can get into the water they’re accosted by a gang of surf punks led by Scally (Aussie actor Julian McMahon, whom I loved on “Nip/Tuck” back in the day). They’re told, “Don’t live here! Can’t surf here!”
The Surfer complies to protect he and his son. Emasculated, The Surfer returns to his Lexus in the car park and the boy goes home to his mother to whom The Surfer is estranged. The Surfer begins engaging with The Bum (Nic Cassim), who also has an axe to grind with Scally and his crew. The longer The Surfer and The Bum talk the more the movie seems to suggest they’re one and the same. They also continue to get picked on by the locals in increasingly hostile ways.
I liked a lot about “The Surfer.” The colors captured by cinematographer Radek Ladczuk (he shot “The Babadook” and reteams with Finnegan after “Nocebo”) pop vibrantly and vividly. (By extension food and beverage are memorably depicted deliciously or disgustingly depending upon circumstance.) The score from François Tétaz (an Aussie genre film vet having scored Greg McLean’s “Wolf Creek”) is cool and appropriately trippy. The performances from Cage (who’s actually fairly reined in for him) and McMahon (playing a yuppie Devil) never fail to impress. The final product would feel right at home with the film’s covered in Mark Hartley’s documentary “Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!.” It’s like our protagonist woke in fright and his day at the beach turned into a long weekend.
The script from Thomas Martin seems to have things to say about gentrification and toxic masculinity, but I’m not entirely sure what they are. It’s just an hour of Cage’s Surfer repetitively being bullied followed by a final half hour of twists, trippiness and a reckoning. Mostly I was left wanting a changing poncho like the ones worn by Scally (red) and The Surfer (blue). I’d get me a green one, but the wife already said no.