THE SURFER : Tuesday 27th May 2025

I saw the MA15+ Rated 'THE SURFER' at my local independent movie theatre this week, and this Australian and Irish Co-Produced psychological thriller film is Directed by Lorcan Finnegan who made his feature film making debut with 'Without Name' in 2016 and would follow this up with 'Vivarium' in 2019 and 'Nocebo' in 2022. The film premiered in the Midnight Screenings section at the Cannes Film Festival in mid-May last year, was released Stateside and here in Australia earlier this month and has garnered generally favourable reviews, and has so far grossed US$2M.

It is the week leading up to Christmas in the small Western Australian beachside town of Luna Bay, and the sun is beating down. We are introduced to the Surfer (Nicolas Cage) and his mid-teenage son (Finn Little) driving down to a car park in a Lexus, with the intention that the father and son go for a surf. The kid is not amused that his dad has taken him out of school for the day, but the dad persists and says that he a surprise in store for his son. They park up, put on their wet suits and grab their surf boards and take the short walk down to the ocean, where dad used to surf when he was much younger and before he relocated to California. The Surfer tells his son that he is intending to repurchase his childhood home for them overlooking that very beach, as it has recently come on the market, and he is in prime position to snap it up. 

However, when the Surfer and his son reach the sand, they are immediately set upon by surfing localists doing their utmost to defend their beach under the matra 'don't live here, don't surf here', and led by Scally (Julian McMahon), who is a self-styled guru determined to protect the beach from outsider non-residents. The Surfer and his son are turned away by Scally and his followers, which mortifies the Kid and makes him want to leave. The Surfer takes the Kid home and returns to the beach.

Desperate to close the deal on the house before the extended Christmas break, the Surfer makes numerous calls in order to secure the needed funds, although is met with resistance from his bank and mortgage lender. During the first day, the Surfer also meets the Bum (Nicholas Cassim), who is living in his broken-down Subaru station wagon parked in a corner of the beachside car park. As the Surfer and the Bum watch Scally and his gang through a pair of binoculars, the Bum tells the Surfer that Scally murdered his son and killed his dog.

Refusing to leave, that night, while the Surfer is in the public toilet block, the locals steal his surfboard and vandalise his car, which results in a physical confrontation. The next morning, the Police (Justin Rosniak) arrive but turn out to be part of Scally's gang and advise the Surfer to leave the beach, which the Surfer is unable to do as the battery in his Lexus is dead, because he spent all of the previous night sleeping in his car with the air conditioning turned on.

Later that day, a kindly photographer (Miranda Tapsell) helps him jump-start his car and takes a photo of him standing next to it. After the photographer leaves, the Surfer's phone battery dies, and because he does not have a charger, it becomes impossible for him to purchase a coffee and food from the nearby beach kiosk, as all of his credit cards were saved to his phone. In order to get a coffee and to charge his phone, so that he can continue securing an additional AU$100K funding for the home, he leaves his father's watch as collateral, and his phone to be charged, with the owner of the kiosk. 

Unable to eat and drink, as Scally's gang had smeared dog turd all over the water fountain, and chained his vicious dog up to the fountain to prevent the Surfer from accessing it. The taps in the public toilet run brown contaminated water, and still refusing to leave, the Surfer begins to lose his sanity. After a confrontation with his real estate agent, who claims not to know who he is, he finds that the kiosk has closed for the day, and he cannot get his phone or his watch back. Additionally, the Policeman who the day before had advised him to leave the beach returns and insists that he move his car, which he tells the Surfer is not in fact a Lexus, which has subsequently been stolen, but rather the broken-down Subaru the Bum had been living in. With nowhere else to go, he takes to living in the Bum's vehicle, taking a sharktooth necklace from the car the Bum had insisted his own son had won in a local surfing competition before he was killed by Scally and his gang.

The photographer returns and shows the Surfer, who by now is driven to the brink of insanity by heat exhaustion and dehydration, a picture of himself she had taken earlier, proving that he is in fact not the Bum and is actually who he originally thought that he was. She offers him a bottle of water which he gulps down needless to say. Enraged and desperate, he goes to the beach, fights and nearly drowns Pitbull (Alexander Bertrand). After struggling to get out of the water, Scally's crew lift the Surfer up onto their shoulders and carry him off, patching him up from the scrapes and bruises he has sustained these past few days, and he wakes in Scally's den to find his phone, his watch and his car keys arranged neatly by his bedside. Scally then reveals to him that the entire experience was a test to ensure that the Surfer was worthy of buying the beachside house he grew up in, and to further ensure that he can be trusted, and as a final test Scally forces the Surfer to torch the Bum's car, which he does. 

Finally able to actually go for a surf, the Surfer, the Kid, Scally, and his gang all return to the beach only to be halted in their tracks by the Bum, who has returned to the beach with a hand gun. The Bum allows most of the gang to leave but insists that Scally, the Surfer, and the Kid stay, because they have become the same locals who had terrorised him initially and had continued to do so. The Surfer, however, is able to convince the Bum to let him and the Kid surf by returning the Bum's sharktooth necklace. As the Surfer and the Kid finally paddle out into the ocean, the Bum executes Scally and then shoots himself in the head.

Whatever you want to say about 'The Surfer' you have to hand it Nicolas Cage for turning out another B-Movie that taps in to his gonzo, bananas and off-beat persona that somehow manages to carry this film along. I struggled with this offering with Director Lorcan Finnegan going intensely close-up on several characters eyes; his frequent darting to various animals as if to showcase the varied wildlife that Australia has to offer from Huntsman spiders, to cicada's, to echidna's, kangaroos, snakes and a wild dog - they're all on display here. And, rather than sweating it out in the heat of mid-Summer, why didn't the Surfer just go to his soon to be ex-wife's house which is clearly close enough as the son rides his bicycle down to the beach for his Dad's final confrontation with the Bum. Because of this the film is repetitive, and there are several plot holes you can drive a truck through, but at its heart it's a film about toxic tribal masculinity, exploitation and one man's decent into (near) lunacy in a beachside car park that so it seems there is no escape from.

'The Surfer' merits two claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five claps.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-