'The Surfer' review: Nicolas Cage is plunged into toxic masculinity hell

Nicolas Cage wages war on a gang of hostile Australian surfers who stole his surfboard.

That's the elevator pitch for The Surfer, a trippy psychological thriller directed by Lorcan Finnegan (Nocebo, Vivarium) and written by Thomas Martin. But there's more afoot within the riptide of this strangely hypnotic film, which ruminates on toxic masculinity and unprocessed trauma while putting Cage through the absolute ringer.

Taking creative cues from Ozploitation classics of the Australian New Wave like Wake in Fright, Finnegan simultaneously reveres and villainizes the Australian landscape, blurring the line between reality and surrealism while throwing everything he has at the Hollywood star. Cage delivers a characteristically unhinged performance, though he's at the risk of being upstaged by an exceptional Julian McMahon.

What is The Surfer about?

Equal parts tense survival thriller and coastal Western, The Surfer essentially takes place within one location: the confines of a beachside parking lot in the fictional suburb of Luna Bay, Western Australia. (It was filmed in Yallingup, located in Wadandi Country, the traditional land of the Wadandi people.)

Credited just as "The Surfer," Cage's character is a man bursting with nostalgia and idealism. Returning to the Australian town he grew up in after a life in California, he's anxious to finally buy his childhood home and reunite his family. He's a classic divorced dad, waxing lyrical about surfing as a metaphor for life in speeches aimed at his estranged teenage son (Yellowstone's Finn Little). But his lofty quest to close the deal and secure a seaside utopia is disrupted by hostile locals, who won't have a bar of him.

When the Surfer attempts to go surfing with his son, he comes face to face with the Bay Boys, a gang of surfers determined to "keep the riffraff out" of their waves — i.e. non-locals. They're brilliantly described by a carpark-dwelling character crudely credited as "The Bum" (Nicholas Cassim) as a "bunch of fuckin' yuppies cosplaying at being surfers." Dedicated to their mustachioed gang leader Scottie "Scally" Callahan (a brilliant Julian McMahon), this hollering group of violent bleached blondes in tank tops humiliate and harass Cage's protagonist, stealing his surfboard and creating hell for him. As for the local police officer (Justin Rosniak), he's in Scally's pocket too.

As soon as he arrives at the Luna Bay break, the Surfer starts to lose. With dwindling personal effects, increasing dehydration, no allies, and a teetering grip on reality, the Surfer wages an uphill battle against his downhill enemies. Somehow, Finnegan and Martin manage to concoct a never-ending supply of misfortune for their protagonist, all while presenting the locals as deeply corrupt and self-serving. But there's more to this place than it initially appears for the long-suffering Surfer.

The Surfer traps Nicolas Cage in the parking lot from hell.

The entirety of The Surfer is set within an asphalt arena, the beachside carpark overlooking the waves that Cage's character so desperately wants to surf again. That the Surfer himself is contained to this bitumen plain mirrors his denied access to the beach. However, this limitation doesn't mean the film is boring by any means, thanks to Cage's signature slow-burn unraveling.

Cage has been unpredictable in his film choices over the last few years, from his serial killer transformation in Longlegs to playing an amped-up version of himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. Here, he's tasked with carrying the whole film as a man just trying to get his stolen surfboard back and catch a wave, and Cage truly leans into gaslit delirium.

Cage's character is pushed to the brink in the film, as his characters often are. But here he's drinking beer out of puddles, eating dead rats, and having his bare feet shredded by carpark broken glass, completely at the mercy of what is by no means a remote environment. As Cage's character stumbles through misfortune after misfortune, the film cleverly and organically becomes a kind of survival drama set within a relatively busy beachside suburb. At many points in The Surfer, you're basically yelling at the screen for this man to get a hotel room and call it a day — two things pretty much always available to him during his turmoil. But there's a deeper reason for the Surfer's determination.

What Finnegan's production team manages to create within one seaside battleground is nothing short of impressive. But probably the most stunning achievement of the film is using Australia's idyllic natural beauty and surfing culture to dive into the sinister realities of toxic masculinity.

The Surfer dives into a particularly Australian brand of aggressive male behavior.

The Surfer is, at its core, a rumination on the harmful effects of hypermasculinity. But it's a particularly Australian, and particularly violent form of it, with the country's tendency to dismiss male toxicity and violence as "larrikin" behaviour. "Boys will be boys," a character literally says aloud in this film.

Finnegan and Martin use surfing culture and the terrifying Bay Boys to sharpen their focus on misogyny and superiority complexes, as well as hammering home Australia's skewed sense of local identity. (The film's local surfer gang, the Bay Boys, seems a subtle nod to the real surf gang from Sydney's Maroubra Beach, the Bra Boys.) While the film doesn't address the hypocrisy of such localism in a country with a violent colonial past, it does go hard on the general messaging of keeping outsiders out, locals in. "Don't live here, don't surf here," the Surfer is violently told by the locals. "Locals only" signs adorn the beach. 

It's the head of this predatory pack who threatens to upstage Cage in The Surfer: McMahon as the chilling Scally. Swanning about with a deep tan and a bright-red beach poncho, this character is so blatantly yet amiably menacing that he gets right under your skin (and that of Cage's character) with cold finesse. Running his "Sanctuary" for young surfers and their problematically younger teen girl visitors — no girl surfers here, no way — Scally's whole deal is that modern men have "gone soft" and "haven't had to suffer." He preaches this to his young followers, encouraging them to unleash their inner "animal" within their beach haven. Under Scally's tutelage, the Bay Boys' abrasive, territorial behaviour isn't just allowed by the rest of the community, it's encouraged, with Cage's Surfer encountering the same level of anti-outsider animosity by other non-surfer locals he comes across in the lot.

In fact, there are only two characters in the entire film who aren't total assholes to the Surfer: his son and a confoundingly underused Miranda Tapsell (Top End Wedding) as a friendly photographer who helps him out. It's overwhelming, this unrelenting hostility. And it's been used as a weapon in many an Australian film.

The Surfer stylistically rides the Australian New Wave.

The Surfer is by no means the first to make a nightmare of Australia's natural environment, amping up the heat, sunlight, and mysteries of the bush for psychological thrills. But Finnegan appears to pay tribute to such Australian New Wave thrillers of the '70s and '80s like Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, Everett De Roche's Razorback, and Tony Williams' Next of Kin. Wake in Fright is the most overt reference here, as a film in which an outsider is also driven to madness by the locals — a psychological state only intensified by the harsh heat and dangerous dehydration. 

Director of photography Radek Ladczuk, cinematographer for Jennifer Kent's brutal Tasmanian film The Nightingale as well as The Babadook, makes a Australian New Wave meal of The Surfer. Meticulously slow or audaciously fast zooms feel right out of the '70s, proving to be a hilariously kitsch but strangely authentic way to capture Cage's earnestness over his beloved waves. Lighting furthers The Surfer's slightly surreal feeling; the entire film feels like it's been drenched in a golden sunlight filter, which moves from idyllic to dangerously searing. The carpark itself glows in green-lit darkness at times, while the lot's cursed toilet block glows an ominous orange. Ladczuk takes full advantage of the strange distortions reflected by metal mirrors typically found in Australian public toilet blocks. 

Then there's that score by François Tétaz and sound design by Aza Hand, resulting in a hypnotic, bonkers smorgasbord of operatic singing, chimes and harps, and blissful orchestral overtures uniquely combined with the sounds of Australian wildlife. Cicadas chirp loudly and relentlessly, a kookaburra's famous laugh becomes a cursed rhythm, and buzzing flies rise as the Surfer's hold on reality slips. It's this combination of whimsy, threat, beauty, and overwhelming powerlessness that makes The Surfer deeply effective.  

Everything about The Surfer's one-line pitch sounds ridiculous (Nicolas Cage versus mean Australian surfers), but the film itself is a haunting set piece about localism, repressed memory, and toxic masculinity, boasting the wild ride we've come to associate with Cage. It's as far from a wipeout as you can get.

The Surfer was reviewed out of the BFI London Film Festival. The film will open in in cinemas early 2025.