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West Australian
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- West Australian
Reel Talk: The Surfer sees Nicolas Cage in his Ozploitation era
3 stars Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Finn Little, Alex Bertrand Rated: MA15+ In Cinemas: Now Some actors transform for a role. Others transform the role itself, bending it in their image. Nicolas Cage has always been in the latter category, and this is certainly the case in The Surfer, the Hollywood superstar's psychological thriller that was shot in Yallingup. Cage calls it 'Nouveau shamanism', illustrated hilariously when he played a version of himself in the excellent 2022 comedy, The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent. But, whatever you call it, no one does it better than him. And by 'it' we're talking about playing characters that oscillate effortlessly between unnatural calm and mania, earnestness and frivolity. If you need an actor who can believably seem unhinged, yet, by the closing credits, salvage sanity from the brink of madness, Cage is your guy. Which is precisely why Irish director Lorcan Finnegan (who previously gave us the trippy 2019 film, Vivarium) had to have the Oscar-winner for The Surfer. Wearing its influences like a blistering sunburn, the movie channels the Ozploitation era of Australian filmmaking, which produced seminal works such as Ted Kotcheff's 1971 classic, Wake In Fright. Think blazing sun, austere cinematography and a nagging sense of unease that permeates everything. The plot follows Cage's unnamed character, who returns to his coastal home town after years working in the US, with a dream of surfing the beloved break of his childhood and purchasing the house he grew up in. There's just one problem — a gang of surfers, known as the Bay Boys, are viciously protective of said break. Led by Scally, a charismatic bloke who doubles as a masculinity guru (played to perfection by Julian McMahon), the Bay Boys' locals-only policy sees them view Cage as an interloper. Stubbornly refusing to leave the car park overlooking the beach until the finance on the house comes through, Cage is inexorably pulled into a conflict with the locals. Baked in the sun, his grip on reality loosens as his desire to build a new life starts to become a desperate and unhealthy obsession. Scally, meanwhile, is indoctrinating young surfers in a storyline that examines modern masculinity, with McMahon finely balancing the menace to ensure the audience is never really convinced he's an outright villain. Similarly, Cage's perspective often feels untrustworthy, and you're left with a sense this could all be in his head, which adds to the surreal nature of the film. In the end, this oddness occasionally overwhelms the drama, and, though Cage's commitment to the role is commendable, going Full Cage is an acquired taste. Finnegan leans into the weird in a way we don't often see anymore, but it's hard to escape the feeling a more straightforward approach might have yielded a stronger result.
Extra.ie
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Extra.ie
FILM REVIEW OF THE WEEK: The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage
Lorcan Finnegan's The Surfer is a sun-scorched psychological trip masquerading as a B-movie beach thriller. Brutal and hypnotic, the film traps its protagonist – and its audience – in a dreamlike purgatory of sweat, sand and simmering male rage. With lurid colours, looping structure, and deliberately disorienting atmosphere, The Surfer channels the existential entrapment of Luis Buuel and the surreal logic of Finnegan's own Vivarium . But where Vivarium boxed its characters inside suburbia, here the trap is wide open: a beach that might as well be hell. Nicolas Cage plays the titular Surfer, a nameless, middle-aged man who claims to have roots in the area, yet is treated like a trespasser the moment he sets foot on the golden sands of Lunar Bay. Bullied by a cabal of locals led by Julian McMahons smirking Scally (parts beach bro and corporate sociopath who smiles like a shark all teeth, no warmth), the Surfer is repeatedly humiliated, gaslit, and physically assaulted. But he stays. Because beneath the farce and cruelty is something quietly desperate: a man clinging to a dream he cant let go of. Nostalgia is the true villain here. The Surfer isn't just longing for a return to place, but to a time when his family was still intact. His fixation on reclaiming his childhood home is a symbol of that delusion. He believes that if he could buy the house and ride the waves again, everything will fall back into place. But these obsessions with the house, beach and his own romanticised past are what drove his wife and son away. His relentless pursuit of success, ownership and legacy, has left him alone and untethered. The tragedy is not that the Surfer has lost those close to him, but that he continues to chase an idealised version of their relationship, instead of accepting what its become – and showing up for them as he is, not as he was. What makes The Surfer stick isn't its visceral tone or Cages red-faced performance (though both are noteworthy). Its the feeling that youre watching someone be erased, inch by inch. There's a looped sense of stasis – like Buuel's The Exterminating Angel – where time stretches and bends but nothing truly changes, except perhaps the level of psychological damage. Time warps. Days blur. Dehydration and exhaustion distort reality. The protagonist is haunted – by a mysterious older man, by glimpses of a lost son, and by visions that flicker and vanish before we can get a grip on them. What follows is a sunburnt descent into madness. Cages character loses everything – his dignity, his car, even access to clean water. He lingers around the beach like a ghost of his own past, baking in his own desperation. Visually, The Surfer is rich with texture and menace. Finnegan and cinematographer Radzek Ladczuk render the Australian coastline as eerily hostile. Heatwaves ripple through every frame; colours are oversaturated, borders blur, daylight is punishing. The air feels thick with menace. Cage is, unsurprisingly, electric. He pitches the performance somewhere between tragic and deranged, veering from wide-eyed optimism to pathetic rage, often within the same scene. As ever, he finds the operatic in the absurd. Hes both delusional and heartbreakingly sincere. He wants his home, his wave, his version of the past – but the film quietly questions whether any of that ever really existed. The idea of poisonous nostalgia also permeates through the toxic, anti-outsider bravado of Scallys surf gang. Their obsession with violence and purity, expressed via threats, intimidation, rituals and faux-philosophies, is both cartoonish and credible in its Make This Beach Great Again vibes, and McMahon plays Scally with a charming menace that holds the film together. The fact that the gang are so irredeemable and violent, yet still don't puncture the Surfers idealised image of the beach, shows how myopic he has become, as well as the weakness of those who choose to align with oppressive forces to feel comfortable. If The Surfer falls short, its in its hesitance to fully explore the emotional depth of its central character. Though the film hints at themes of grief, legacy, and the crushing weight of unfulfilled dreams, it often prioritises tension and confrontation over delving into these complexities. Yet, this very ambiguity reflects the Surfers internal struggle torn between the person he was, the person he believes himself to be, and how the world perceives him. Finnegan crafts a lean, eerie, darkly funny film that lingers long after it ends. If Vivarium boxed us in, The Surfer lets us wander – sun-struck and sand-blasted – until we realise we've been trapped all along. In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below:
Irish Examiner
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Film review: Nicolas Cage is brilliantly cast in The Surfer
The Surfer ★★★★☆ A sport, a way of life, a philosophy for living: surfing lends itself to extravagant myth-making, which The Surfer (15A) is happy to lean into as the movie opens, with our eponymous hero (played by Nicolas Cage) informing his estranged son (Finn Little) that life's crucial moments are a lot like encountering a massive wave: 'You either surf it,' he says, 'or you get wiped out.' But when the Surfer returns home to surf the remote beach at Luna Bay, he discovers that the shore has been colonised by the Bay Boys, led by the guru-like Scally (Julian McMahon), and that a culture of 'localism', which refuses entry to non-natives, is tacitly encouraged. Outraged at being denied the right to surf, the Surfer refuses to leave, setting him on a collision course with Scally and his thugs. Nicolas Cage is brilliantly cast here, playing an ostensible tough nut who privately mythologises a gilded past in which surfing equalled freedom and endless possibility; now, separated from his wife, and desperate to put his old life back together, the Surfer is trying to reinsert himself into the exclusive world of Luna Bay by buying his childhood home. But our hero, we fear, is doomed before the story even begins: a dreamer given to exotic fantasies of the perfect life, he is prone to delusion even before dehydration, heatstroke and the Bay Boys' escalating aggressions cause his grip on reality to loosen. Irish director Lorcan Finnegan ( Vivarium) blends the Surfer's fever-dream into a stunningly beautiful landscape, heightening the effect of the increasingly surreal episodes as the disorientated Surfer plunges deeper into paranoia; meanwhile, the cultivated Scally, who likens his followers to Shaolin monks, is gradually revealed to be an erudite exemplar of toxic masculinity. A vivid account of a fragile man's attempt to regain his paradise lost, The Surfer is a powerfully poetic drama. theatrical release Ocean with David Attenborough ★★★★☆ Ocean with David Attenborough Ocean with David Attenborough (G) sets out to explore 'the last great wilderness of open ocean,' a realm, Attenborough tells us at the outset, that is 'almost entirely a mystery.' Who better to guide us through the murky depths than Attenborough himself, who, at 98 years young, is one of the planet's greatest living treasures. He may be considerably frailer now than he appeared in his very first outing (the film employs old footage of the young naturalist frolicking in the sea), but his passion for the natural world remains undimmed. Almost inevitably, Attenborough isn't simply revealing the ocean's hidden wonders; this film also serves as a warning about climate change, and about the existential crisis being caused by the industrialised fishing of an increasingly scarce resource; but it also sounds a hopeful note, demonstrating how quickly the ocean can bounce back if afforded the opportunity. If Ocean does prove to be, as Attenborough suggests, his final film, it is a fitting testament to his life's work. theatrical release The Wedding Banquet ★★★☆☆ Lily Gladstone and Kelly Marie Tran in The Wedding Banquet Set in Seattle's Asian-American LGTBQ community, The Wedding Banquet (15A) is a droll farce about doing whatever it takes to survive. Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are trying to conceive; their best friends Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-Chan) are desperate to prevent Min being dragged back to Korea by his wealthy, conservative family. And so Min proposes – literally – that he should marry Angela, with her 'dowry' being the cost of the latest round of Lee's fertility treatment. Andrew Ahn's film revels in subverting expectations – Angela's 'Tiger Mom' May (Joan Chen), for example, is outraged that her darling lesbian daughter would even consider marrying a man – and the script is littered with dry one-liners ('Queer theory takes all the joy out of being gay.'). For a film that satirises conservative attitudes, however, The Wedding Banquet is itself excessively polite and restrained; it's fun, but it might have benefited from a little more irreverence. theatrical release
RTÉ News
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Ego Under the Sun. Nicolas Cage is swell as The Surfer
"You're just not meant to be here..." Well, if you are a Nicolas Cage fan, you are definitely in the right place, as this ego-under-the-Sun psychodrama ranks with his best of recent years. In Irish director Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium), the screen legend has found another filmmaker who brings out the best in him. Cage's Man with No Name returns to the beautiful Australian beach of his early years, all set to buy his childhood home overlooking the bay. And then everything falls apart as he roasts alive in a car park. If there's a more beautiful location on this Earth than Yallingup, Western Australia, well, send us a postcard. The Surfer is a gorgeous-looking film that juxtaposes stunning views with menace - both ecological and psychological. True to Aussie form, the landscape becomes a leading character, and Cage's hapless blow-in also has to contend with gimlet-eyed locals who seem determined to make his stay a short one. Faraway beaches are always gold... In Irish writer Thomas Martin's screenplay, there are elements of both the Western genre and the unleash-the-fury dynamics of the vigilante movie, but The Surfer also manages to skewer guru notions, property porn, and the arrival fallacy that sees so many of us struggling to keep our heads above water. "It's all building to this breaking point," Cage says prophetically. Clocking in at 100 minutes (maybe 10 too long), The Surfer is one of those films where you're always wondering about the next indignity that awaits the sweat-soaked mess at its centre. What happens when a success story loses his identity and the possessions he holds so dear? Pull up a deckchair here and find out as Cage goes through all the gears as only he can. By the end, you'll feel like you've been staring at the sky for too long.
Irish Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
The Surfer review: Nicolas Cage, after too many wipeouts, catches a great wave
The Surfer Director : Lorcan Finnegan Cert : 15A Starring : Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Finn Little, Nic Cassim, Alexander Bertrand, Rahel Romahn, Miranda Tapsell, Justin Rosniak, Charlotte Maggi Running Time : 1 hr 40 mins 'It will come again. It will be a swell so big and strong it will wipe clean everything that went before it.' So says a character in Big Wednesday, John Millius's masterpiece from 1978. That tale of California surfers – a macho cadre chewed up by the 1960s in Millius's view – exemplifies US culture's tendency to mysticise the business of riding waves. You got it in the underrated TV series John from Cincinnati. Brian Wilson's sacerdotal approach to the activity reached its peak with The Beach Boys album Surfs Up, in 1971. Now Lorcan Finnegan, the Irish director of Vivarium , fattens the theology with a fascinating, weird, freaky drama set in an unforgiving corner of Australia. The poetry is of a more abrasive stripe than Wilson's soothing gibberish. This often brutal entertainment, shot in blotched light by Radek Ladczuk, kicks its protagonist to the brink of death as circling antagonists point and chuckle. READ MORE But we are always reminded that surfing is an exalted way of wasting a man's time. This film wouldn't work if it were about train spotters or stamp collectors. There are some signs of Nicolas Cage, older and more American than seems likely, being shoehorned into the title role, but such is his commitment and presence that no sane viewer will object. Indeed, the film is inconceivable without him. This is how we now roll with the Cagester. He makes half a dozen straight-to-streaming duds and then hits the motherlode with Mandy, Pig ... or The Surfer. Here he plays an unnamed businessman returning, after many years in the United States, to the beach where he surfed as a kid. (It was probably as well not to have Cage attempt an Aussie accent.) He takes his son and his board – a gift from his own father – down to the sea, but is immediately rebuffed by the butch locals. 'Don't live here, don't surf here,' he is tartly informed. This doesn't bode well for his plans to buy a house in the old neighbourhood. What follows has the quality of fantastical nightmare. Our surfer meets an older fellow, now living in his car, who tells him that the gang, led by a charismatic thug, Scally (Julian McMahon), killed his son and his dog. The tough guys steal our hero's surfboard. His car is soon out of action. He cannot charge his phone and, as all his credit cards are stored there, he is unable to buy any food. Out here in the rational world there would be ways of resolving these issues. But the Irish screenwriter Thomas Martin, who has worked on series such as Tin Star and Ripper Street, forges us an allegorical space that abuts the absurd. He admits the influence of John Cheever's story The Swimmer – and of the film version with Burt Lancaster – and, sure enough, there is similar interest in the pressures of masculinity. The current film is, however, considerably more at home to the crunch and squelch of the outsider life. Scally's gang could hardly offer a more obvious stand-in for contemporary alpha-male toxicity, the social-media bully made sunburned flesh. The film does, perhaps, lose the run of itself in a slightly desperate final act that sees the protagonist's resolve weakening in unsatisfactory, inconsistent directions. Some viewers may crave a little more conventional plot from a film that revels in pinballing masochistic chaos. But The Surfer, for all its unpleasantness, offers encouraging evidence that there is still room for existential awkwardness in contemporary cinema. No better, odder man than Nicolas Cage to act that out as the catechism of surfism gains another worthy chapter. In cinemas from Friday, May 9th
