The Surfer (15)

A nameless father returns to Australia to buy his childhood home, which has just come on the market. To celebrate, he takes his teenage son 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, who threatens physical violence if they dare to head to the beach where Scally and his bullying acolytes have staked their claim to sand and sea.

LondonNet Film Review

The Surfer (15) Film Review from LondonNet

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.

– Jo Planter