Film Review of the Week

Thriller

The Surfer (15)

Review: Men will be mental and boys will be bonkers. The heat-induced delirium is real in Irish director Lorcan Finnegan’s sun-scorched psychological thriller, drenched in toxic, chest-beating machismo. The Surfer slowly winds up Nicolas Cage like a clockwork toy then unleashes the Oscar-winning actor on an Australian beach and neighbouring car park to deliver a trademark performance of steadily mounting madness.

Screenwriter Thomas Martin crams the second half to bursting with nuttiness, confident that Cage will shuffle towards the precipice of his character’s full-blown hysteria and linger in that sweet spot of sustained suspense before Finnegan’s picture teeters over into snort-inducing risibility. Punctuated with woozy close-ups of Australian wildlife in full voice, the film piles misery onto the much-abused surfer dad and delivers a psychedelically grim fate as decreed by a Julian McMahon’s local guru: “Before you can surf you must suffer.”

The title character’s propensity for self-sabotage is ridiculous and certain illogical decisions contrive to disadvantage him so he unfairly resembles one of the so-called “undesirables” that the brutish locals are determined to turn away from their coastal haven. Fragmented flashbacks dam the narrative flow and an insistence on bringing the story full circle with a repeated visual motif feels uncharacteristically neat compared with the artfully staged messiness of what crests and crashes before.

A nameless father (Cage), who left Australia for California as a boy after his father died, returns to the sun-baked southern hemisphere to buy his childhood home, which has just come on the market. To celebrate, he takes his teenage son (Finn Little) down to Luna Bay so they can surf together and get a clear view of the property from the water. “Don’t live here. Don’t surf here!” barks a thug named Pitbull (Alexander Bertrand), who blocks the path of father and son and threatens physical violence if they dare to head to the beach where Scally (Julian McMahon) and his bullying acolytes have staked their claim to sand and sea.

The father initially backs down to protect his boy but he returns and becomes involved in tit-for-tat one-upmanship with Scally and his gang. An ageing vagrant (Nic Cassim), who claims Scally killed his dog, and a visiting photographer (Miranda Tapsell) show the father kindness in his hour of need but local cop Coban (Justin Rosniak) makes his allegiances clear.

The Surfer confidently rides the wave of Cage’s wild-eyed theatrics with prolonged periods of just him on screen battling heatstroke, hallucinations and spectres of the past. Testosterone-driven tribalism is spiked with black humour, such as when a female resident endorses Scally and the gang brawling on the beach. “Stops them beating the Botox out of their wives,” she wryly suggests. No known force in the universe can stop Cage from spiralling down under.

Comedy

The Uninvited (15)

Review: Regrets? Dysfunctional characters in The Uninvited have a few and they aren’t shy about airing them during a garden party where rich, fabulous and famous guests rub shoulders with waiting staff hungry for their big breaks. An unexpected arrival at the front gate throws the exclusive, invite-only soiree into disarray and catalyses various revelations and self-reflections that usher some attendees towards enlightenment and leave others foundering in the dark. Writer-director Nadia Conners, wife of actor Walton Goggins, contemplates Hollywood’s enduring obsession with age and beauty through the eye of a female protagonist played by Elizabeth Reaser, who has sacrificed professional ambitions to become a stay-at-home mother.

In a jaunty opening sequence, she receives a telephone call from her agent with feedback from her latest acting audition: “They said you’re too old to believably play the mother of a six-year-old child. It felt tragic.” Predictably, the crestfallen character has a son around that very age and Reaser swallows the irony with glum resignation. On-screen chemistry between Reaser and Goggins’ disconnected spouses is convincingly fraught but Conners’ script veers into wordy melodrama that sounds unnatural and dialogue-heavy sections betray the project’s origins as a stage play. Pedro Pascal broods in a Hawaiian shirt in a dramatically significant supporting role.

Talent agent Sammy (Goggins) and wife Rose (Reaser) prepare to host a party at their Hollywood Hills home to impress guests connected to Sammy’s work. Fissures in the marriage are apparent. “Do you listen to a word I say?” snipes Rose. “If I’m being honest, I drift,” calmly responds Sammy as babysitter Tracy (Kate Comer) monitors the couple’s young son Wilder (Roland Rubio). The first person to arrive is a confused elderly lady named Helen (Lois Smith), who claims to be looking for her husband and mistakenly believes she lives at Sammy and Rose’s house. Sammy urges his wife to get rid of the interloper.

Helen’s friend Barbara (Annie Korzen), listed in an address book, kindly agrees to collect her. Meanwhile, husband and wife bicker about their invited guests including Sammy’s key client Gerald (Rufus Sewell), Italian ingenue Delia (Eva De Dominici) and Rose’s old flame Lucien (Pascal), who is embracing sobriety after a brief stint in rehab. Tensions rise and Sammy pleads with his wife to support him: “Can you please just be on my side for one night?”

The Uninvited feels like a glimpse inside a rarefied world that Conners and her husband know well. Smith’s heartfelt performance as an apologetic gatecrasher trapped in a fog of muddled memories is the fulcrum for politely barbed satire that occasionally draws blood. Conners’s picture is most compelling when characters are in emotional freefall. Their self-inflicted misery is good company.

Comedy

The Wedding Banquet (15)

Review: More than 30 years ago, when Oscar-winning director Ang Lee released the original version of The Wedding Banquet, gay marriage and same-sex adoption hadn’t been legalised, the HIV and Aids epidemic continued to generate headlines, and Hollywood was poised to release the first mainstream film dealing with the virus: Philadelphia starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington. James Schamus, co-writer of the 1993 film, revisits the culture clash comedy through a contemporary lens in a crowd-pleasing collaboration with director Andrew Ahn that boasts two grand dames of Asian cinema: Joan Chen and Youn Yuh-jung, who deservedly won an Oscar as the twinkly-eyed grandmother in Minari.

Relocated from New York to Seattle, the updated Wedding Banquet walks a line between sappy sentimentality and heartfelt teariness, particularly in scenes involving Yuh-jung and her on-screen grandson played by Han Gi-chan, who fears disclosing his sexuality will be met with his family’s rejection. “I can’t make you the grandson I wanted you to be,” she tenderly notes, armed with understanding words that many members of the LGBT+ community yearn to hear when they come out. The theatricality of a Korean wedding ceremony in traditional costume, including a moment when the bride piggybacks on the groom and he must confidently carry her around the room, provides a rich source of humour in a second half that tries a little too hard to tie up narrative threads like neatly pulled bows atop the wedding gifts.

Lee (Lily Gladstone) undergoes a second round of expensive IVF with her partner Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) but their hopes of starting a family together are cruelly dashed. Emotionally and financially spent, the couple commiserate with Angela’s best friend Chris (Bowen Yang), who lives in their converted garage with his student artist boyfriend, Min (Gi-chan).

Min’s visa is about to expire so he hatches a seemingly harmless plan to marry Angela for a green card and in exchange, he will leverage his vast family fortune to pay for a third round of IVF. “You have mother issues. It’s not the same as motherhood issues,” Lee assures Angela, referencing the fractious relationship with her mother May (Chen). Min’s plan is complicated when his grandmother Ja-young (Yuh-jung) announces a surprise visit to America and declares a simple ceremony at the local courthouse will not suffice for her image-conscious clan.

The Wedding Banquet is a warm, comforting hug of a romantic comedy that plays to the strengths of the ensemble cast. Tran sheds the lioness’s share of tears on screen and is the film’s emotional core but she still snaffles a few salty one-liners. Ahn and Schamus’s script revisits intergenerational strife but now gets to explore same-sex parenting, promoting female characters to the fore.