The Surfer (2025)

I've long been some sort of bizarre, partial Nicolas Cage apologist. It certainly feels like a long time since he won an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and yet it also seems like he's been back on our screens for decades since the Cage wilderness years.

This late career 'renaissance' has been going on for some time now, and it felt like it had culminated with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022); a postmodern, self-referential, intertextual mess; a film that had its moments, but ultimately felt like a missed opportunity.

Instead, during this latter career period Cage has actually produced his finest work in the smaller films he's been party to. Pig (2021) was an interesting piece of work that, although slight, pulled an understated and impressive performance from Cage as a truffle hunter living alone in an Oregon forest. Last year's Longlegs had Cage on gloriously unhinged form as serial killer. And in 2023's rather decent Dream Scenario, he was on very good form as a man who everyone suddenly starts seeing in their dreams.

When you think about it, each of these performances (bar the underwhelming Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) have got better and better- so it makes sense in a way that Lorcan Finnegan's The Surfer draws the best performance from Cage in years.

He plays the titular surfer, returning to Lunar Bay in Australia where he lived as a kid, obsessively trying to purchase the house overlooking the ocean in which his father used to live. The film begins with Cage pulling into the beach car park with his son, and doesn't leave the location of the bay for the duration.

The Surfer wants to surf with his boy, and show him the house he's attempting to buy, but is denied entry by a group of locals who tell him "Don't live here, don't surf here." It quickly becomes clear how serious they are after Cage's son has left the scene and he's returned despite the warnings he's received.

The Surfer is a demented B-movie not trying to be anything else, and that's partly why it succeeds. The other reason is Cage himself, terrific as he slowly descends into a broken man looking more and more like the homeless man that lives in a car by the beach. He won't leave for a variety of reasons- mainly because he's desperately trying to close a deal on the house, but the locals begin to make his position more and more untenable- stealing his possessions, making the public water fountain inaccessible, and slowly driving him mad.

The film is captivating in it's sweat, blood, and hallucinogenics- accompanied by a terrific jazzy score by Francois Tetaz, which punctuates the film's visual beauty and increasingly unhinged behaviour. We get glimpses and partial flashbacks which seem to be happening in the Surfer's head, but it's all very unclear what exactly is going on- and yet at the same time you think this all only ends one way.

The Surfer loses its way in the final quarter, descending into a dreamlike state and drug fueled nonsense; not without its pleasures but almost disappointing in the way it somehow feels the need to justify its own exploitational roots.

However, The Surfer is thoroughly entertaining and might contain the best Nicolas Cage performance of this decade- if he wasn't officially back (he definitely was) he's only even more so now. 7.2/10