A middle-aged father is rebuffed by aggressive locals when he attempts to take his son to his childhood waves in The Surfer, which premiered out of competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and played at the Aussie & Kiwi Film Fest in Prague ahead of its debut in Czech cinemas from May 8. This trippy, beguiling film unfolds with dream logic and casts a spell over the audience while keeping us at arm’s length for the duration; at the very least, it is unlike almost any other film you’ll see at the cinema this year. Or any other.
The Surfer stars Nicolas Cage as its unnamed protagonist, an Aussie-born but American-raised businessman who drives his teenage son (Finn Little) to his childhood home in a small town on the continent’s southwestern coast (the film was shot on locations in and around Perth). That home is for sale, and Cage’s surfer aims to buy it—if his precarious financial situation, revealed through tense phone calls with his real estate agent (Rahel Romahn), will allow for it.
But his idyllic journey home soon turns into a sun-drenched nightmare when, suited up to hit the waves, the surfer and his boy are rebuffed by a group of local hooligans who claim ownership of the beaches. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” the burly Pitbull (Alexander Bertrand) barks at them before they can reach the water, humiliating the surfer in front of his son.
But that small injustice is only the beginning of what will soon spiral into a sun-bleached nightmare. The son finds his own way home, but Cage’s father becomes trapped at the beach like the dinner party guests in Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel. It’s a psychological thing, at first—he just can’t let it go—but circumstances soon conspire to keep him there even as he tries to leave.
And so the surfer haunts the beach’s parking lot, scrounging for food and water in the oppressive heat, sleeping in his car, and spying on the beach bullies through a pair of binoculars. He befriends a bum (Nicholas Cassim) who lives out of his van in the parking lot and blames the hooligans for the death of his son—or is this a vision of the surfer’s future self?
Julian McMahon stars as Scally, leader of the local surf bullies and a kind of Tony Robbins-like alpha male guru. “You can’t surf until you suffer,” he menacingly threatens our protagonist through a disingenuous smirk. The waves the surfer longs for become a metaphor for freedom from the trappings of a repressive society he fights in vain to extract himself from.
For the majority of The Surfer, we watch Cage’s character suffer through increasingly surreal scenarios as he fights for survival, perhaps in his own mind. At the heart of the narrative’s central allegory is this man’s confrontation with aggressive masculinity, and the self-destructive pull of trying to fight one’s way out of conflict. At first humiliated, as Cage’s character stands up to the bullies he eventually turns into one of them—which comes with guilt, but also its own sense of release.
The Surfer was directed by Lorcan Finnegan, who previously made the similarly puzzling suburban nightmare Vivarium. Like that movie, The Surfer plays with audience expectations and leaves us wondering exactly what is real within its narrative; but unlike that film, there’s a wealth of fascinating subtext here that makes this an endlessly satisfying watch, regardless of what we make of the story.
Finnegan and screenwriter Thomas Martin, both from Ireland, conceived The Surfer as an outsider’s view of Australia, and that vantage point is what makes the film’s surreal tone feel earned. Inspired by John Cheever’s The Swimmer, the story takes on a dreamlike, allegorical shape: we’re not watching a story about a beach argument, but rather a man’s slow psychological unravelling amidst an oppressive environment.
Despite gorgeous location cinematography from Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook), this is not a tourism ad for the Aussie coast but a sun-scorched purgatory where politeness gives way to primal rage. Through Cage’s committed performance, his best since Pig or perhaps even Mandy, we’re left with an unforgettable portrait of a man adrift—not just in the parking lot by the sea, but in his own mind, wading through a culture that no longer has room for him.
The Surfer may frustrate viewers who expect narrative coherence, but like the films of Buñuel or David Lynch, it remains compulsively watchable despite the lack of clear explanations; tensions build to a fever-pitch of paranoia even as we doubt what is “real” in the world of the movie. They don’t make films like this any more, but they didn’t used to, either—The Surfer is that rare cinematic thing, a truly unique oddity that defies description and simply must be seen.
