Adolescence fans must watch 'stunning' thriller inspired by toxic masculinity
Netflix's popular series Adolescence has been a hot topic since its premiere in March this year.
The show features Stephen Graham as Eddie Miller, a father whose life falls apart when his 13-year-old son Jamie (portrayed by Owen Cooper) is arrested for the murder of a female classmate.
The four-part drama received acclaim for its unflinching exploration of tough issues such as the harmful impact of social media and the increasing incidents of violent misogyny among teenage boys.
For those viewers who were deeply moved by Adolescence and are interested in further exploring how toxic masculinity can manifest in older men, they should check out the latest thriller starring Nicolas Cage, The Surfer.
While at first glance this surreal journey into desperation featuring Cage's unnamed protagonist returning to his Australian hometown and clashing with locals seems like a very different project, it delves into the same themes as the Netflix hit by examining male tribalism, reports the Express.
Cage's character, who aims to repurchase his childhood home and surf the beach with his son (played by Finn Little), immediately finds himself at odds with a group of cult-like surfers led by the charismatic Scally (Julian McMahon), who presents himself as a sort of male wellness guru.
In an interview with Express Online, director Lorcan Finnegan shared the origins of his film's distinctive villain, drawing influence from the likes of outspoken 'manosphere' figure Andrew Tate, who is mentioned in Adolescence.
"He's an amalgamation of a lot of people like that," Finnegan remarked. "Probably not as bad as Andrew Tate.
"He's got a bit of Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson. There's another guy called Tim Morrison, who's a little bit more on the shaman side.
"There are a lot of these people who are self-help gurus that work in the corporate world and they bring people in on these retreats where they teach them how to get in touch with their inner-selves and masculinity.
"And then they go back to their jobs and fire 300 people, or something. So there's this contrast between this spiritualism and corporate-capitalist mindset."
While The Surfer doesn't focus heavily on violence against women, it delves into the toxic dynamics among men who sideline those they categorise as 'outsiders'.
Cage's role sees him fall prey to this spiteful behaviour as the male group's bullying begins to erode his very sense of self.
"[Scally] was slightly based on those people, but Julian also made the character his own," continued Finnegan. "He had ideas about his haircut and ways of speaking to these guys and having this kind of call and response.
"So, he plays the character very well where it's slightly less black and white than a kind of Andrew Tate, who's obviously a misogynist. Whereas Julian played him as someone... you might think he is trying to help Nic.
"From his point of view he was, from his character's point of view he was trying to help him understand his ideology, even though it was quite dark. He's more ambiguous as to whether he's a good guy or a bad guy."
The film is currently exclusive to cinemas, so seize the chance to watch this captivating companion piece to what's been Netflix's roaring success of 2025.
The Surfer is in cinemas now. Adolescence is available to stream on Netflix.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
23 minutes ago
- Spectator
What I learned from running my own Squid Game
You know how this story goes. The cameras are rolling. The audience is cruel. You're trapped in the game and the game is death and the game is going out live from the heart of the state of nature where empathy is weakness and you kill each other off until there's only one left. What will you do to survive? Who will you become if you do? This is the plot of Squid Game, Netflix's Korean mega-hit that just drew to its gory conclusion. It is also the plot of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Running Man, Chain-Gang All-Stars and The Long Walk. We have spent several decades watching desperate people slaughter each other for survival to entertain the rich and stupid. Future generations will probably have thoughts about why we kept returning to this particular trope with the bloodthirsty voyeurism we associate with Ancient Rome. Obviously, these stories are meant to say something about human nature, and the depraved things desperate people can be made to do to each other; they're meant to say something about exploitation, and how easy it is to derive pleasure from someone else's pain. Squid Game says these things while shovelling its doomed characters through a lurid nightmare playground where they die in cruel and creative ways. After each deadly game, blood-spattered contestants are offered a chance to vote on whether to carry on playing. It's a simple referendum: if a majority votes to stay, they're all trapped in the death-match murder circus with only themselves to blame. If they object, a masked guard will accuse them of interrupting the free and fair elections and shoot them in the face. This is everything Squid Game has to say about representative democracy. 'I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society,' said director Hwang Dong-hyuk, just in case you didn't get the message. The whole thing is as subtle as a shopping-mall shooter. I'm reliably informed that the English-language translations strip away a degree of nuance, which probably helps audiences in parts of the Anglosphere where irony is an unaffordable foreign luxury and the experience of everyday economic humiliation feels a lot like being hit over the head with a huge blunt analogy. Squid Game does not want you confused about who the baddies are. There's a bored cabal of cartoon billionaires drinking scotch and throwing tantrums while they watch our heroes shove each other off cliffs. They smoke cigars and say things like 'I am a very hard man to please'. We never get to find out who they are or what their plan is, because it doesn't matter. How could it possibly matter? How could anything matter in a fake hotel lobby where all the furniture is naked ladies? This is how people who want to be rich think people who are rich ought to talk: like insurance salesmen cosplaying sexual villainy in a kink club for tourists. Nobody is supposed to be able to relate to the Squid Game villains. As it turns out, though, I can. There's an innocent explanation for how I came to run my own Reality Show of Death Game. Well, mostly innocent. I happen to have a secret other life as an immersive game designer. It's what I did instead of drugs during my divorce, after discovering that here, finally, was a hobby that would let me be a pretentious art wanker and a huge nerd at the same time. The games are intense – like escape rooms you have to solve with emotions. Many of them revolve around some species of social experiment – the kind that actual researchers can't do any more because it's inhumane. Famously, the 1971 Stanford prison experiment had to be shut down early after students who were cast as guards got far too excited about abusing their prisoners. The sort of people who pay actual money to play this kind of game are expecting to be made to feel things. They're expecting high stakes and horrible choices and wildly dramatic twists. The Death Game trope is an easy way to deliver all of that. Mine forced players to pick one of their friends to 'murder on live television'. It's a five-hour nightmare about social scapegoating with a pounding techno soundtrack. I had a lot going on at the time. I swotted up on Hobbes and Hayek. I took notes on Squid Game and its infinite derivatives. I gave the players character archetypes to choose from – the Diva, the Flirt, the Party Animal – and got them to imagine themselves in Big Brother if it were produced by actual George Orwell. I wrote and rewrote the script to make sure players wouldn't be able to opt out of picking one person to bully to death. I thought that it would be easy. Instead, I learned two surprising things. The first was that it's harder than you'd think to design a scenario where ordinary people plausibly hunt each other to death. Every time, my players tried their very hardest not to hurt each other, even when given every alibi to be evil. I created a whole rule system to punish acts of altruism, spent ages greasing the hinges on the beautiful hellbox I'd built for them, and still the ungrateful bastards kept trying to sacrifice themselves for one another. Even the ones who were explicitly cast as villains. Even when it was against the rules. It takes a lot of fiddly world-building to make violent self-interest feel reasonable. It takes a baroque notional dystopia and a guaranteed protection from social punishment. What you get is a manicured, hothouse-grown garden masquerading as a human jungle – an astroturfed Hobbesian state of nature where the cruelty is cultivated to make viewers feel comfortable in complicity. The story of these games scrapes the same nerves as the ritual reporting about shopping-mall riots on Black Friday – the ones that lasciviously describe working-class people walloping each other for a £100 discount on a dishwasher. The message is that people who have little are worse than people who have more. This is a wealthy person's nightmare of how poor people behave. The rich, of course, are rarely subject to this sort of moral voyeurism. But that story isn't true. In the real-life Lord of the Flies, the children actually worked together very successfully. In the real-life Stanford prison experiment, the guards had to be coached into cruelty. Real poverty, as sociologists like Rutger Bregman keep on telling us, is actually an inverse predictor of selfish behaviour. Not because poor people are more virtuous than anyone else, but because the rich and powerful can afford not to be. The rest of us, eventually, have to trust each other. The fantasy of these games is about freedom from social responsibility. In the Death Games, nobody has to make complex and demeaning ethical choices as an adult person in an inhumane economy. In the Death Games, it makes sense to light your integrity on fire to survive. But if we did, actually, live in a perfectly ruthless market economy where competition was the essence of survival, none of us would survive past puberty. The Death Games don't actually tell us anything about how life is. They show us how life feels. The second surprising thing I learned while running my own Squid Game is that nothing feels better than running Squid Game. If you need a rush, I highly recommend building a complicated social machine to make other people hurt each other, picking out a fun hyperpop soundtrack and then standing behind a production desk for five hours jerking their strings and cackling until they cry. People apparently like my game. It has run in multiple countries. And every time, it took me days to come down from the filthy dopamine high. It turns out that I love power. This was an ugly thing to discover, and there's an ugly feeling about watching a show like Squid Game – which is, to be clear, wildly entertaining. Voyeurism is participation, and the compulsive thrill of watching human beings hurt each other for money creates its own complicity. The audience is not innocent. Sit too close to the barrier at the beast show and you risk getting splashed with moral hazard.
Daily Record
2 hours ago
- Daily Record
Donald Trump 'caught cheating' at his Scottish resort as caddie moves ball for him
A video has emerged from Donald Trump's golf course in Scotland appearing to show a caddie dropping a ball for the US President on the fairway as he played a shot Donald Trump has found himself embroiled in another golfing scandal after footage emerged seemingly showing a caddie dropping a ball for him during a round in Scotland. While on a European trip and visiting his golf resorts, the US President was caught on camera playing at Turnberry when it appeared one of his caddies may have overstepped the mark to help him. The video, shot from within a nearby building, captures Trump arriving by golf cart on the left side of the fairway. With a bunker and some light fescue between him and the green, as he stopped, two caddies walked past – with one seemingly pausing to place a ball in front of Trump. The 79 year old exited the cart, golf club in hand, and approached the newly positioned ball, seemingly ready to take his next stroke. The clip concludes before he takes the swing. the Express. "Who needs a foot wedge when you have a personal ball dropper? ? ?" joked one user on X, previously known as Twitter. Another user humorously suggested, "Him and Kim Jong Un would be INSANE scramble partners." A self-proclaimed PGA professional chimed in with, "Such a perfect metaphor for our Commander-in-Cheat." Some social media users playfully admired the incident. "Wild... Looks like I need these fellas as Caddies with the way I hit it anymore," one comment read. This is not the first instance of Trump being accused of bending the rules on the golf links. Is Donald Trump a cheat on the golf course? Earlier this year, Samuel L. Jackson, the esteemed actor, alleged that Trump had cheated during a game they played together. When queried about who was the better golfer, Jackson confidently stated: "Oh, I am, for sure. I don't cheat." Trump has since refuted the claims of having played with the 'Pulp Fiction' star, asserting on social media that such a game never took place. Actor Anthony Anderson has echoed similar sentiments. During an appearance on 'Late Night with Seth Meyers' in 2016, Anderson remarked, "Trump is a great golfer. I'm not going to say Trump cheats. His caddy cheats for him." When pressed for details on whether he witnessed Trump cheating, Anderson affirmed: "Oh yes, several times. Several times." He recounted an occasion where both he and Trump had poor tee shots. "Trump hit the exact same shot but went 20 yards further left than mine," he explained. "I couldn't find my ball in this trash. Trump's ball had the fluffiest lie in the middle of the fairway." Anderson concluded: "Like I say, I didn't see Trump cheat because he was on the tee-box with me, but his ball was right there in the middle of the fairway." Sportswriter Rick Reilly has delved into these allegations, asserting in 2019 that Trump frequently manipulated his ball's position and even took credit for others' shots. In an article for The Sunday Times, Reilly revealed that Trump's caddies had even dubbed him "Pele" due to his frequent ball-kicking antics. "To say Donald Trump cheats is like saying Michael Phelps swims," he penned. "Trump doesn't just cheat at golf. He cheats like a three-card monte dealer. "He throws it, boots it and moves it. Whether you're his pharmacist or Tiger Woods, if you're playing golf with him, he's going to cheat."
Daily Mail
3 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Beloved ITV detective show slapped with 'trigger warning' for crime scenes in 'woke' move
ITV 's Inspector Morse has been slapped with a 'trigger warning' in a move that has been branded ' woke '. The popular series now features a pre-warning for crime scenes throughout the show, which seems to have caused a stir with people online. The streaming giant also advises there are 'satanic images' in one episode of the drama. It then has a parental lock on the episode, titled Day of the Devil. Inspector Morse first aired from 1987 to 2000, with a total of eight series. Other episodes also feature a warning over crime and violence. The popular series now features a pre-warning for crime scenes throughout the show, which seems to have caused a stir with people online Speaking about the update, Senior MP Sir Alec Shelbrooke slammed: 'This is another example of soft-touch Britain seeping into everything. 'We're just going to be laughed at as a country if things like this continue, because nobody's prepared for the real world where there are no.' Daily Mail has contacted ITV for comment. In the past, it has said about general alerts: 'Programming that contains politically sensitive or distressing themes, content, or language has carried appropriate warnings since our launch.' Just a few weeks ago, Netflix bosses axed an iconic moment from Pride and Prejudice to avoid 'objectifying men'. The unforgettable scene of Mr Darcy - played by Colin Firth - emerging from a lake was all the rage in 1995. But show bosses have confirmed it will not resurface in the forthcoming version of the rom-com. According to reports, many fans will be disappointed as the famous BBC scene is said to have 'got millions of women hot under the collar'. A source told The Sun: 'It is also credited for sparking subsequent moments of male objectification on screen - likes Aidan Turner's famous topless scything scene in Poldark.' It's claimed that Netflix bosses 'don't want a repeat'. The saucy scene soon became one of the most favourite TV scenes, however it didn't actually feature in Jane Austen's original 1813 story. Arguably the most iconic wet shirt ever worn sold at auction for £25,000 - double its estimated sale price.
