Summary
Nicolas Cage battles sun, surf and suburban menace in this delirious descent into Australian beachside bro culture.
Nicolas Cage and Australia have a few things in common: from the outside, both can seem otherworldly, perhaps even unknowable. So it feels entirely fitting that Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan casts his gaze over our beaches and finds something closer to Wake in Fright than a surfer’s paradise.
Finnegan keeps us off-balance from the outset, leisurely intercutting extreme close-ups of native flora and fauna with equally tight shots of Cage’s twinkling eyes. Cage is The Surfer, as the retro opening titles winkingly declare, a man returning to his Australian beachside hometown to buy back his family home. But the beach is territorially, and at times violently, guarded by the Bay Boys, a gang of local ruffians led by the guru-like Scally (Julian McMahon).
Desperate to finalise the sale before Christmas, the Surfer becomes almost fanatically tethered to the parking lot overlooking the beach. With only an unhoused man (Nicholas Cassim) living out of a station wagon acting as the last thin tether to reality, the taunts and escalating assaults of the Bay Boys steadily push him past the brink of sanity.
Finnegan’s vision of Australia is a harsh one, both in its physical landscape and in the xenophobic undertones that restrict the Surfer’s entry into ‘local’ culture. Yet there’s a universality to this too, a commentary on ‘bro’ culture and toxic masculinity. The Surfer’s only options appear to be guru or vagrant, and the closeness of his descent suggests how little it might take to fall into the latter.
Perhaps only Cage could make us simultaneously question everything we’re seeing while still fully buying into his experience. For a time, he plays it relatively straight, and we may even empathise with his plight. But as the summer sun and endless taunts wear him down, the Cage door swings open and the unhinged performance we expect begins anew.
Finnegan and cinematographer Radek Ładczuk, already familiar with Australia’s darker landscapes in The Nightingale and The Babadook, visually convey the Surfer’s spiralling reality. Everyday moments are made startling through disorienting camera angles, and new elements become either sources of safety or objects of terror—sometimes both.
By the end, it’s hard to say what Finnegan wants us to believe, or if belief is even the point. In the end, even Nicolas Cage finds that breaking into the Australian property market is a psychedelic ordeal that nearly destroys him.
2024 | Australia, Ireland | DIRECTOR: Lorcan Finnegan | WRITERS: Thomas Martin | CAST: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak | DISTRIBUTOR: Madman Films/Stan (Australia) | RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 15 May 2025 (Australia)
