Even a Sunburnt Nic Cage Can’t Keep The Surfer Afloat

The man known only to us as The Surfer (Nicolas Cage) heads to the beach with his teenage son (Finn Little). Though he sounds American, The Surfer was actually born in Australia, where he’s now living again. He’s trying to scare up the financing to buy his childhood beachfront home. He wants to take his son surfing to show him the best possible vantage point of the new house.

Unfortunately, however, the beach is already littered with very proprietorial surfers, who do not take kindly to strangers. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” is their refrain; when The Surfer tries to hit the waves, they resort to violence. He is humiliated – he does not have the closest relationship to his boy, and had planned this trip in large part to impress him – but that humiliation makes him determined. He will live there. He will surf there. Or he will die trying.

Lorcan Finnegan intended The Surfer to be a tribute to the 1968 Frank Perry classic, The Swimmer. In that earlier film, Burt Lancaster plays an advertising executive who decides to spend a lazy summer Sunday “swimming home” across his neighbor’s backyard pools. Lancaster starts the movie as a happy professional implied to have a loving family and plenty of good friends. Pool by pool however, the illusion slips, and his dream life is revealed to be empty at its center. He ends the movie weeping in a rainstorm by the front door of his locked, deserted house, with absolutely nothing to his name.

Similarly, The Surfer is about the lack of solidity beneath the stereotypical masculine dream of being a good provider, with a nice watch, a fancy car, and an adoring family. The Surfer pulls up to the beach in a Lexus. Soon after his ordeal begins, that car disappears and is replaced with a rundown red jalopy. The beach bums try to gaslight him that the Lexus never existed, and we are briefly left wondering whether they are right, but ultimately what matters is that something as tangible and solid can be taken away in an instant. Whether it was real or not, as Burt Lancaster discovered six decades earlier: material wealth is an illusion.

Knowing about that link with The Swimmer is really the key to the movie. If you hear the premise “Nicolas Cage goes up against some asshole beach bums in Australia,” you will have certain, violent expectations. Cage spends the vast majority of The Surfer suffering through a near-complete destruction of the mind, body and spirit. Eventually, he becomes a painfully sunburnt, dehydrated, jabbering wreck, scavenging from dustbins and, at one point, even considering biting into a dead rat. Watching it all unfold, anyone even slightly familiar with Cage’s oeuvre will be thinking that, surely after sinking to such depths of degradation, the comeback will be glorious.

They’d be wrong. After one hour and thirteen minutes of psychological torture, there is an end to The Surfer’s suffering, but rather than coming in a whirlwind of violence, it comes courtesy of an induction into an unlikely secret society, and some reckoning with his sad past. Which is … fine. But after such a prolonged, titanic build-up, the lack of bloody catharsis does make the ending land with something of a hollow thud.

Cage is no stranger to more contemplative productions (Pig was only four years ago), and amidst his more bombastic work, has proven repeatedly that he’s a strong enough actor to be really effective in a quieter gear. If the film had been more acute with its commentary than “the American(/Australian) dream is built on sand!” and “toxic masculinity is bad!”, then perhaps an unexpectedly subdued finale would have felt like less of a letdown. Instead, the movie gets caught between stools, not splattery enough to be fun, and not insightful enough to be all that thematically interesting.

On a stylistic level, however, The Surfer has far more to recommend it. Pretty much the whole film is set in the same area of a beachside complex, and not a scenic area either – it’s largely just the car park. Finnegan’s dynamic direction ensures that this never feels dull or claustrophobic. It certainly helps that the color palette is so eyeball-searingly vivid; the hardest thing in the whole movie to watch isn’t any gore, or even the whole rat incident, but The Surfer’s skin after sunburn has turned it the color of a radioactive lobster. Adding more pleasurably to the sensory deluge is François Tétaz’s terrific score, which carries strains of Morricone in its mythic propulsion.

Then of course, there’s Cage. As The Surfer, he is larger than life in the way that only he can be, but there is a human level of desperation that adds poignancy to his slide into lunacy, even as the script doesn’t serve him well when it comes to character depth (he’s never buyable as Australian, despite the oft-repeated and somewhat tortured backstory) and logic (why God why doesn’t he just leave the car park?). Cage has never been less than immensely watchable in any movie, good or bad. In those like The Surfer, which falls somewhere in the middle, he continues to prove an unparalleled ability to transcend mediocrity, and turn any performance into a one-man firework show.

Director: Lorcan Finnegan
Writer: Thomas Martin
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak
Release date: May 2, 2025

Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.