Surf’s up: Nicolas Cage in ‘brilliantly trashy’ beach thriller

The Surfer

(100 mins, 15) Directed by Lorcan Finnegan; starring Nicolas Cage, Finn Little, Julian McMahon

The scariest thing in the movies? Not zombies, vampires, demonically possessed Victorian dolls or freakishly large rodents. Not even deranged killer clowns. Lorcan Finnegan’s trippy Nicolas Cage-starring psychological thriller The Surfer makes a persuasive case that few things in cinema are as utterly terrifying as the Australian male. Cage plays a father whose plan to hit the waves at a beach in western Australia with his teenage son (Finn Little) is thwarted by a tight-knit and aggressive group of local surfers, in a story that ramps up the machismo to the point of madness, and then goes way, way beyond. It’s a lurid, unashamedly pulpy B-movie, a throwback homage to the low-budget “Ozploitation” genre movies of the 70s and 80s. Drenched in testosterone and stale sweat, this is a heady cocktail of sadism and surf culture which plays out under the kind of unrelenting sun that melts your brain. It’s trashy as hell, and I loved it.

The Surfer has nothing particularly profound to say about the themes it explores: it touches on tribalism, the ultra-competitive flexing of alpha-bros, a xenophobia so entrenched and magnified that anyone born outside of a five-mile radius is fair game. It trades in vibes rather than ideas and as such, it probably shouldn’t work as well as it does. But there’s a horribly compulsive quality to this meltdown of a movie, largely thanks to the casting of Cage in the central role; he’s the perfect fit for this kind of visceral, sensation-driven voyage into delirium. It’s an all-timer of a Nic Cage performance, which is to say it’s a gurning, gonzo blitzkrieg with no brakes, no off switch and absolutely no subtlety.

There’s also no attempt from Cage to muster an Australian accent, despite the key plot detail that the beach where he hopes to surf with his son is the one where he grew up. And despite moving to the US after the death of his father (a rather cursory explanation for the lack of an Aussie accent but it’s the best we are offered), he has never let go of the dream of returning. He’s on the brink of closing a real estate deal to buy back the clifftop house that his family used to own. The local surfer gang’s battle cry of “Don’t live here, don’t surf here” is particularly galling since he believes this stretch of coastal water, with its generous swell and idyllic white sand, is in his blood.

The locals, who call themselves the Bay Boys, think otherwise. The man (he’s never named) is stung by the humiliation meted out by the bullies, who diminish him in front of his son. But his decision to stand up to them is a tipping point into a psychological breakdown. He loses his shoes, his car, his phone, his self-respect and most of his marbles. By the third shimmering, sun-baked day, mocked by kookaburras, assaulted by rats, the man is no longer sure who he is. He seems to have switched identities with the local vagrant who lives in a car in the corner of the parking lot. But who is being gaslit here, the character or the audience?

Director Finnegan (Vivarium) and writer Thomas Martin are both Irish, but this is film-making steeped in the feral violence that apparently simmers under the surface of Australian culture. The use of sound is punchy and aggressive. Even the colours feel amped up and muscular. Over the years, this crackling threat has been harnessed in everything from the Mad Max series to harrowing horror movie Wolf Creek; from 1971 classic Wake in Fright to Kitty Green’s superb thriller The Royal Hotel and a host of low-budget genre pictures (I recommend the lively 2008 documentary Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! to anyone with an interest in this particular cinema subculture).

As the story takes an unexpected turn, the disorienting visuals and blurred realities start to evoke the wigged-out ayahuasca sequence in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer. Don’t go into this expecting a neat resolution – this is not tidy storytelling. If there’s a takeaway message, it’s that monsters lurk at the hearts of all men, not just the Australians.