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Rating: Australia, apnea and scorching heat cooled by the turquoise backdrop of the sky.
A predominant color like red, the color of Nicholas Cage’s surfboard, of the devilish uniform worn by Villain Scally (a Julian McMahon also in a state of grace, Dr. Troy from Nip/Tuck), a mystical guru leading the local surfers’ gang. Rouge like the blood and the wine that will flow fraternally in this mad story. Nicholas Cage is the Surfer, half dream and half wide awake, a middle-aged manager returning to the forgotten scene of his dream, to that childhood beach, Luna Bay, hoping to reconnect with the past and buy his late father’s villa. On the day of his return to Luna Bay, however, his first instinct on the sand is freedom; he asks his son to start the day surfing on the beach, but a local surfers’ gang immediately menaces and blocks them: you don’t surf in Luna Bay unless you’re part of it. And that’s where an adrenaline-fueled timer begins, pushing Cage into an intense spiral of delirium and hallucinations.
In the scorching Australian parking lot of The Surfer, Nicolas Cage is undoubtedly Best in Class, appearing in perfect maudit style as only he can and flawlessly bringing to life his character’s degeneration. From a middle-aged manager in a Lexus to a dehydrated drifter eating weeds and insects, he perfectly embodies the total metamorphosis of his obsession—the ambition to reclaim the family villa overlooking Luna Bay’s headland. The Surfer, sunburnt and with rage in his eyes, wanders like a human wreck among waves he can no longer ride, hunted mercilessly by the local thugs. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here” is the mantra haunting him, an echo of social exclusion and tribalism, the group, the sect—in reality, actual gears of exclusive and absolute power, even in society—a symbol of corporate and exclusive power, disguised as surf mysticism.
Cage is superlative in his initial and gradual débâcle, almost hallucinatory, like a madman stranded on some forgotten island in Jodorowsky’s filmography, through the progressive physical and sensorial unraveling, in his conflicting and later nourishing relationship with the island’s rats, but that is also his immense and unique comfort zone.
In his unexpected Rebirth.
Just as in Vampire’s Kiss, where madness merged with tragicomedy, or in Pig, where the loss of a pig became an elegy of love and grief, here too he is a broken man, but the outsider isn’t seeking revenge—he seeks reconnection, the gladiator in a drama without an audience, only sun and sand.
Lorcan Finnegan directs with a feverish touch, transforming the Australian landscape into a nightmare of toxic masculinity and tribal delirium. That parking lot becomes a prison, a theater of the absurd with all the characters forming a coalition against the surfer: a biblical and insular delirium with Cage as a postmodern Christ, crucified not on wood but on asphalt.
And yet, beneath the pulp and psychedelic framework, The Surfer is a tale of belonging, of denied identity, of a world that rejects and is violent toward those who do not conform. Cage, as in Mandy or Joe, is the man who can never go back, because the past has been erased, and the present is a punishment leading first to oblivion and ultimately to death, unless the cherubic alternative of rebirth is granted.
The Surfer is not a film for everyone. It is a ritual—perhaps a cursed one—a descent into the hell of obsession. But for those who love Cage at his purest—the maudit Cage, the wretched/aging Cage, the one who laughs while going up in flames—it is a mystical experience not to be missed. Because when Cage suffers, cinema breathes.
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