The Surfer – Film Review
by Brian Merriman

Written by Thomas Martin
Directed by Lorcan Flanagan
Starring: Nicolas Gage, Julian Mac Mahon, Nic Cassim and Miranda Tapsell

The Surfer arrives in Ireland almost a year after its selection in Cannes 2024. Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan, it is an Australian and Irish collaboration with a wide range of production companies. Billed as a psychological thriller and starring 60-year-old Nicolas Cage in the title role, it is no ordinary Christmas story.

It’s a weird and macabre plot by Martin, set on a lush beach in Australia where ‘only locals can surf’. This definition does not include Cage, who spent his early years here, when he tries to introduce his son to the beach and the sport that will allow them to recreate his own childhood. He goes to great lengths to acquire his former family home, now on sale as a Christmas present, to rebuild his broken family life, both past and present.

It’s a bizarre plot, full of the stereotypical toxic masculinity, often used to portray the Australian male. This is lavishly illustrated by Ladczuk’s spectacular cinematography, which indulges rightly in the white topped green sea and intimate photos of wildlife.

It is hard to know who or what is real. Are Cage and Cassim (an ageing vagrant) the same character, or are they related in any way? There’s a series of incidents that may be borrowed from the scenic surroundings of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 classic, Death in Venice. Martin’s screenplay may also take a good ritualistic tumble at Harry Hook’s 1990 Lord of the Flies and ends up with the endurance of a contestant in the contemporary TV series I’m a Celebrity, often used just to disgust the viewer. Why Cage’s character puts himself through all of this is not always clear.

There is a cult sanctuary which has taken over the local beach, and all in the neighbourhood seem to be in cahoots like an episode of ABC’s 2004 hit series Lost. Julian Mac Mahon (of Irish descent) is the menacing guru and, akin to the plot of Nick Love’s recent Marching Powder, he has a following of middle-aged (and some younger) men, with no difference in their aggression or devotion despite their age and occupations. Suffering makes the man…apparently.

With more than a bow to an ageing man, whose marriage is over, like Dirk Bogarde in Venice, Cage is at times an onlooker as memory and incidents trigger a collision of timelines, where the past and present clash, not always in a clear or linear way. He takes incredible risks for a man of his age for seemingly trivial reasons. Throw in a lack of morality from the gang of Australian toxic male stereotypes and the more virtuous (of course) American central character, through a series of violent acts which apparently affirm manhood regardless of the consequences.

There were consequences hinted at from the past, but once again, sequencing is opaque. Though only 99 minutes in duration, it feels long, perhaps not helped by the lack of linear clarity. The relentless, almost dementia-like behaviour of the surfer, the implausibility of any transformation and the colliding of the vagrant’s subplot, all end up with a bizarre tale that allows Cage to play weird and crazy in a very picturesque surrounding.