If there’s one person you want to cast in your movie about a man waging war against local thugs, who slowly but surely has a mental collapse, it’s the ever-eccentric Nicolas Cage. Pair Cage with Lorcan Finnegan, director of bizarre suburban horror Vivarium, and you have a match made in heaven – or hell, as the scorched setting of psychological thriller The Surfer soon proves to be.
On an Australian coastline lies the childhood home of Nicolas Cage’s unnamed protagonist; The Surfer, as he is named in the credits. A former surfer and native turned Californian real estate mogul who lost his Aussie drawl after 40 years of being away, the Surfer returns to Lunar Bay with his son (Finn Little) to buy the home he grew up in and surf some stellar waves. However, as he walks onto the beach, he clashes with the ‘Bay Boys’, a cult-like group of local blokes who mercilessly spit “Don’t live here, don’t surf here” into the Surfer’s face. After their unofficially elected leader Scally (a deliciously nasty Julian McMahon, giving a career-best performance) threatens to hurt the Surfer’s son should they attempt to surf, the Surfer departs.
A sane person may resign against this stonewall of chauvinist bullies, but Cage’s Surfer is in a crisis of masculinity. His childhood home is 100 thousand dollars over his budget, his ex-wife is pregnant, the relationship he has with his son is tenuous at best, and he has risked his job to chase the property he has dreamed of owning since his father passed away. Parking his Lexus in a nearby car park, the Surfer loiters around long enough to incur the wrath of the Bay Boys again, who steal his surfboard and place it upon their beach-side shack as a trophy. This begins a chain of events that sees Cage’s Surfer slowly but inevitably descend into a hallucinatory hellscape as he is gaslit by the Bay Boys and the various residents who worship at the Scally altar.
This includes a police officer summoned by Cage’s Surfer, which is where Finnegan’s film begins propagating ideas around toxic masculinity and how pervasive patriarchal bravissimo is in society. Scriptwriter Thomas Martin writes each character as thin archetypes to extrapolate this idea that each man within the confines of this society are toxic. This is highlighted in the end credits of the film by each member of the crew being known only by their job title of bank manager or barista. Scally, an aggressively red-blooded patriarch, screams in the face of his patrons “To surf, you must first suffer”; this is the mantra of Finnegan’s gruelling picture.
But it is not ‘surfing’ that Scally is truly discussing when he barks this mantra at his follies or at the Surfer, but the concept of ‘man’. The journey that the Surfer character must undertake in order to surf, or to be a man within the narrative here, is destructive of the soul. Finnegan is commentating on the loss of identity that occurs when you attempt to assimilate into a society that doesn’t want you to exist. As the Surfer has his meltdown under an infernal Australian sun, what he experiences is a form of masculinity gentrification.
The issue a film like The Surfer has is that this chaotic descent into insanity is a miserable experience. It is very easy to critique a film like this for being unpleasant to watch but, ultimately, it is. The actions of Scally and his scallywags are surmountable to torture as they steal the Surfer’s car, smear dog excrement across a drinking fountain and gaslight him into believing he is as worthless as the vagrant they also torment. Finnegan’s frisky direction of crash zooms and intense close-ups of perspiration dripping, coupled with Radzek Ladczuk’s deeply saturated colour palette makes for an exhausting picture, one that can’t quite muster enough catharsis for the audience by its inevitable endpoint.
The figurative trial by fire that Cage’s Surfer must go through in order to be accepted by this chauvinist group – whose bullying tactics are described and accepted by a local woman as “better than beating the Botox out of their wives” – means that as he gets more frazzled, he transforms into an unreliable narrator. This results in a state of desensitisation to the audience. As much as the film’s hyperkinetic flashbacks of the Surfer’s previous trauma affords us a peek into his psyche, by the time it needs us to lend our empathy, it can’t be mustered as we’ve been punished as much as he has.
It is always tough to review a film like The Surfer in any binary terms of good or bad because a film aiming to disturb doing just that is ultimately successful. As alluring as The Surfer’s ideas of hybridising toxic masculinity with gentrification are, and the groovy surf rock score is a real vibe, the film has a cruel, alienating edge to it that wears thin. There may be an audience for a film as miserable as this one – Requiem for a Dream certainly has its fans – but this is a film one can’t ever see wanting to experience twice.
The Surfer will screen at the upcoming Glasgow Film Festival.
Learn more about the film, including how to watch, at the GFF site for the title.
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