Review: ‘The Surfer' is Nicolas Cage at his most unhinged

San Francisco Chronicle​

28-04-2025

Nicolas Cage's character in 'The Surfer' is a man running on empty. So much of his life is going wrong, and to obtain a shred of dignity, he has put in a bid on his beachside childhood home overlooking the Australian surfing spot he hung ten as a budding young man.
All he wants to do is surf this beach, but a group of hard-edge locals — imagine 'Sons of Anarchy' motorcycle gang types, except surfers — led by a weather-beaten Julian McMahon, won't let him.
'Don't live here, don't surf here,' they say repeatedly.
When the movie begins, the Surfer (no one in the film has a character name) is taking his son (Finn Little) out to catch waves when the locals stop him. The teen isn't really interested in surfing; this is his dad's thing. He seems uncomfortable around his dad, who is going through a painful divorce from his mother.
The dad takes his son home, but returns to the beach, determined to surf.
That's it. That's the movie. As the Surfer becomes increasingly desperate in the contest of wills, he becomes unhinged, and in cinema, an unhinged Nic Cage is the best Nic Cage. Really, it seems like this one-of-a-kind film could only have been made with Cage in the lead. It's quite possible that had he passed on the project, Finnegan would have shelved the project.
Cage has created his own genre, characters whose madness is a valid response to the increasingly chaotic world around him: The man on parole bent on revenge in David Lynch's 'Wild at Heart' (1990); the bingeing alcoholic in 'Leaving Las Vegas' (1995), which won him an Oscar; the corrupt cop in ' Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans ' (2009); the hermit-like former chef in 'Pig' (2021); and more recently, the lunatic carjacker in ' Sympathy for the Devil ' and the befuddled professor who inexplicably appears in people dreams in ' Dream Scenario ' (both 2023).
And that's just to name a few.
'The Surfer' has a sun-dappled look of idyllic nostalgia, and feels like an exploitation movie from a half-century ago. It reminded me of 'The Swimmer' (1968), a movie with Burt Lancaster as a man trying to reclaim his standing with the privileged community that has shunned him by 'swimming' across the neighborhood through each of his wealthy neighbors' backyard pools; or the 1971 'Ozploitation' Australian film 'Wake in Fright,' in which a school teacher arriving in a remote small town is forced to go on a weekend drinking binge with the coarse, sweaty locals.
Interestingly, writer Thomas Martin and Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan based 'The Surfer' on a real life surfer gang, the Lunada Bay Boys, who ruled a Southern California surf spot in Rancho Palos Verdes and were recently ordered to stay away as part of a legal settlement.
I doubt that the Lunada Bay Boys ever had to deal with a character like Nic Cage, though. Who in the real world has? The movies are where his distinctive characters live, and the cinema is better for it.