This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. Nicolas Cage has been known to give himself completely to a character and their circumstances, and his work in Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer is the latest testament to that skill. A quintessential midnight movie, the bold and brutal film is Cage at his rowdiest, giving him every bit of the spotlight to do what he does best: go entirely mad.
His performance makes way for an exciting yet crushing look at how brutality, pride, and confidence can threaten to poison everything we work for. It might come as a surprise that there’s very little surfing in The Surfer, which is more concerned with the dark side of machismo, male anxiety, territorial pissing contests, and social class than it is with hitting the waves. This is what makes it more than a fun romp, as Cage tussles with the feral gang of locals who control the idyllic Australian beach he once called his own.
(Their claim: “You don’t live here, you don’t surf here.”) Over the course of one scorching Christmas holiday, Cage’s unnamed protagonist – who’s returned to the Gold Coast with his son to purchase his family home – is forced deeper and deeper into insanity. His spiral culminates in a soul-crushing ending that questions our treatment of those who’ve fallen into houselessness from a life of stability.
Under these most dire of circumstances, The Surfer forces its lead to empathize and connect. The thriller bolsters its cruel world w.