For a long, sun-addled stretch, Lorcan Finnegan’s beach-set “The Surfer” simmers as a deliciously punishing nightmare, driving Nicolas Cage into his most natural state: a boil.
“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” is the slogan at a pristine stretch of beach along Luna Bay on the Australian coast where our unnamed protagonist (Cage) has come to surf with his teenage son (Finn Little). The “locals only” signs, though, don’t deter him. He was born there, and has come back to surf the break and show his son the million-dollar house on the hills nearby he plans to buy.
But the situation rapidly disintegrates. He’s roughed up by the pushy local surfers, his son takes off, and one issue after another keeps him stuck there on a hillside overlooking the ocean. Anyone who comes to “The Surfer” expecting glamorous photography of perfectly tubular waves will be disappointed. This is a movie that gets a remarkable amount of mileage out of a parking lot.
It also belongs to that small niche of films where things get so unbearably terrible for the protagonist that the psychodrama becomes more a matter of endurance than pure entertainment. I’m thinking of movies like “U-turn” or “Affliction” — films where a character’s inability to reckon with their reality spirals miserably.
As time wears on, Cage’s character gets bloodied, sunburned and incredibly thirsty, and the film grows hallucinatory and surreal. There are snakes, rats and bird eggs. The Lexus he arrives in is towed. His suit gets dusty and ripped. Small nuisances — a dead cellphone battery — accumulate. The sun seems to be melting his brain, so much so that he’s no longer sure of who he is, and we start to doubt what’s real, too.
What’s happening here? The Surfer, as he’s credited, is hell-bent on reclaiming something. He envisions reuniting with his family at the new house, but his separated wife, on the phone, tells him she wants a divorce. Is “The Surfer,” penned by Thomas Martin, a metaphor for knowing when to cut bait? Cage’s character won’t accept his loses, and so he ultimately comes to risk much more.
When Finnegan begins to answer these questions in a third act that brings us closer to the surfer bros on the beach, “The Surfer” becomes more tolerable to watch and yet less transfixing. The beach gang, led by a man named Scally (Julian McMahon), are something of a cult for reviving an old-fashioned idea of masculinity. With this turn, the strong undertow of “The Surfer” dissipates.
But if there was ever an actor to elevate pulpy, not-fully formed genre material, it’s Cage. His performance of a man brought to near-disintegration can be neatly filed alongside Cage’s many other head trips to the brink. All he needs is a bluff above a beach to make “The Surfer” churn with the currents of a man tenuously close to being swept out to sea.
“The Surfer,” a Roadside Attractions release that’s in theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language, suicide, some violence, drug content and sexual material. Running time: 103 minutes. Three stars out of four.
