You can never return home, a lesson learned all too late by a man (Nicolas Cage) who has worked himself to the bone to buy his childhood home; a beachfront property on the Australian coastline.  He takes his son (Finn Little) out of school to start the Christmas holiday a little early and catch a few waves, but the pair is barred entry to the beach by Scally (Julian McMahon), the leader of a local gang that has taken the beach as their own and is not welcoming to non-locals.   

The Surfer premiered as part of the Midnight selection at the 2024 edition of the Cannes Film Festival.  Directed by Lorcan Finnegan and written by Thomas Martin, the 100-minute sun-drenched psychological thriller was distributed in the United States by Lionsgate through way of Roadside Attractions.  The film’s runtime is packed, but because it is stuck serving two narrative masters, it feels like an endless nightmare; both praise and criticism here.  Thematically, The Surfer begins to examine and dismantle the pillars of toxic masculinity while narratively it is trying to weave a trippy descent into madness, and while both threads are thoroughly explored, they do not always intersect in the most fulfilling ways, especially once it becomes clear they are working towards their own separate conclusions. 

The ever-reliable and ever-manic Cage adds some credibility to the effort, committing to the wild ebbing and flowing of his titular arc.  Martin charts the poor man’s decent into madness which allows for Cage’s specific wielding of unhinged behavior to shine in an environment where the shaking of social norms is almost expected so that the performance is at one with the overall piece instead of acting outside of it.  For much of the first act, Cage shares the scene with a bum (Nicholas Cassim) who has been living out of his car for some time, broken down in the corner of a parking lot.  In the delirium of the Australian sun, The Surfer slowly starts laying down some Lynchian framework that would find Cage’s surfer devolving into the bum, especially as camera operator Radek Ladczuk’s cut away shots of small character details are assembled in a contrast/compare pattern by editor Tony Cranstoun, and how so few people beyond Cage ever interact with Cassim on screen. 

Ultimately, the film takes a separate route and languishes in a rather formless late middle act before taking some propulsive and wild swings as it reveals its conclusion.  The story tips into a new – and, frankly, messier – form of chaos in this last act, and though there are moments that scratch at something pretty neat, the script finds itself circling the drain as it tries to tie up everything that came before instead of letting the mystery stay a little loose.  It is revealed that the beach gang were torturing the surfer as part of an initiation test to make sure that he has what it takes to hang.  In the belly of the beast, with the drugs and alcohol flowing freely, we are waiting for Cage to take a vigilante, revenge fueled turn that never comes.  Now, most of that is our fault for bringing these preconceived notions to the film, but the frantic construction of this final act lends even viewers uninitiated to Cage to come to these more violent conclusions.   

All that to say, The Surfer still ends with moments of bloodshed and the firing of Chekhov’s gun with the return of the bum to the beach.  His painful story had been hinted at along the way about loosing a child, and again, the structure of delivery of this backstory lends itself to being a mirror for who the surfer will become, so when it is revealed that The Surfer is much more straightforward and direct than it is initially perceived, a lot of the allure of the story is lost.  It is the bum who is taking his revenge, and as Ladczuk’s camera will often catch the concerned and confused look of Cage in this sea side execution, Martin’s script stumbles one last time in never reckoning with the surfer’s acceptance of the beach gang’s way of life.  What could have been a damning fable about culpability lets its protagonist off the hook, paddling out to catch some waves with his son; a storybook ending to a film that, admittedly, would make for an enthralling beach novel. 

The Surfer is still an interesting film, packed with individual nuggets that are engaging and downright unsettling and threatening at times.  There is an expert handle on the tone and nature of the film across the board, it just struggled to synthesize into something greater than the sum of its parts.  Thankfully, though, those individual parts all show promise, and there is a thrilling mystery at play across most of the film’s runtime.  The fumbling of the final act is always a difficult thing to recover from as it tends to cast a shadow that pulls down the entire experience, but each frame is packed with captivating scenery, beautiful people, and puzzling images that we are soon lulled into the films rhythms as it passes us by like hazy vignettes playing out in the sand in our peripheral as we lounge under the warming, yet oppressive, summer sun. We feel the anxiety of the moment like beads of sweat and sunscreen across fresh-burnt skin, and like witnessing a nightmare, we are unable to wipe it away or find relief in the shade.