Director: Lorcan Finnegan
Stars: Nicolas Cage, Julian MacMahon, Nicholas Cassim
When Lorcan Finnegan’s prior feature – slippery suburban nightmare Vivarium – dropped in the opening months of the first COVID lockdown, its appearance felt too close to the bone. A dark fairy tale of confinement in the unassuming streets we’d took for granted when we were free to leave them. But it also showcased a filmmaker attracted to big ideas, and suffered from being denied a cinematic release to display how Finnegan paints on a large canvas. His latest offering, The Surfer, arrives in far freer climes, and promises us the uninhibited expanse of the open waves. But it’s every bit as claustrophobic and knotty as his previous.
Luna Bay is the idyllic Australian beachfront community of Nicolas Cage’s anonymous Surfer’s childhood, now the lifeline of his mid-life crisis as he faces a crumbling marriage. If he can just purchase an old family property, somehow everything will be fixed. It’s a myopic obsession which runs him into a heap of trouble as he takes his son (Finn Little) on a premature trip back to the old neighbourhood for some father/son bonding at the beach, only to discover that the local surfing community is a tight-knit pack of privileged bullies who are incredibly territorial about the shores that our man used to call home. “Don’t live here? Don’t surf here” is their curt mix of threat and refusal.
‘Localism’ is the term used for such aggressive territorialism, and while it isn’t over-prevalent in the global surfing community, it is used here to create a maze of toxic masculinity for our confused and wounded Surfer to navigate. It is as confounding to its protagonist as the endless rows of houses are for the fearful couple in Vivarium. From a sharp script by Thomas Martin, this isn’t presented as a one way street. Our Surfer has plenty of opportunities to reach the exit. His insistence on staying at Luna Bay in spite of warnings and even clear offers of assistance belay his own territorialism. What he perceives as determination is also ego-centric male belligerence.
The beach rats here are led by business guru Scally (Julian McMahon) who purports that men need to reclaim their place as natural aggressors; a Fight Club-esque philosophy that he proceeds to inflict on Cage’s desperate father for his own good. But, as intimated, on some level our Surfer understands and accepts the rules of Scally’s game from the very beginning. He is systematically robbed of all his worldly possessions through opportunistic cons that often ask him to relinquish his remaining goods of his own free will. A prized watch. A phone. And, cumulatively, his dignity. But is he fleeced or does he acquiesce? Flashes in the edit suggest some level of precognition in the Surfer. Some inevitability. What’s presented is a man catching up to his own subconscious, following a need he only comes to understand as he reaches true desperation.
The Surfer isn’t an advocate for Scally’s Andrew Tate-ish bro-ism. It makes it very clear that Scally and his privileged compatriots are problem causing brutes – predatory in more ways than the game of entrapment Cage’s Surfer is engaged in. But it does pick at the idea that, after centuries of stomping around without consideration, the male ego isn’t quite prepared for the emasculating effects of societal progression. The film’s slightly strained end game pivots entirely on our Surfer’s ability to retain some sense of moral code, even as Scally drags him closer and closer to the role of supplicant. There’s also a tiered classism at work here. The rich and affluent preying on new money; the middle-class holiday makers who revile The Surfer’s increasing appearance of homelessness.
The obvious touchstone for all this is Ted Koetcheff’s 1971 dry-mouthed masterpiece Wake in Fright; a totem of Australian cinema that The Surfer kneels before. It’s a fair attempt at a modernisation of that film’s examination of the tensions between rural communities and perceived outsiders. There’s a great pride and heritage about the landmark films of the ’70s that broke out from Australia worldwide, and The Surfer is dutifully reverent to this. In-keeping, the early a-chronological edits and atonal sound expressions even directly recall Nicolas Roeg’s seminal Walkabout. The film’s thwarted masculinity is also something we’ve recently seen in Kitty Green’s pressure-cooker outback thriller The Royal Hotel. While we’re throwing reference points around, perhaps the more fitting Fincher touchstone is The Game, which saw Michael Douglas’ stiff, isolated businessman tricked into abandoning the accoutrements of his walled-up lifestyle as a grand gift of personal freedom.
But Irish filmmaker Finnegan is also walking his own path and drawing further influences and inflections into his work. There’s something Leone-esque in his use of close-ups, playing what might be perceived as a feeble territorial tête-à-tête with the same operatic largess of a grand spaghetti western. A level of irony. The use of these close-ups also impresses upon the viewer a sense of claustrophobia that the expansive coastal setting might not otherwise have achieved. Spying from distance through foliage at this hotbed experiment infers a further sense of enclosure and entrapment. The Surfer is a warm, sickly picture, with a generous colour palette that intensifies the sense of the sun bearing down on its increasingly thirsty protagonist.
Cage is near his best here, teetering between something naturalistic and the heightened acting style that he has became known for. Rather than let him totally off the leash, Finnegan shows some judicious restraint, tugging the reins so that the meme-worthy Cage only bares his teeth in flickers. This latter part of Cage’s career has thrown up some scattered acclaimed indies like Mandy and Pig. For my money his work in The Surfer is just as (and often much more) nuanced and interesting than either of these. He’s evidently game for this enquiry into what makes a man in our confused and oft over-opinionated modern world.
The run to the end may lack the simplicity of the picture’s core premise, but tidy work between the script and the edit ensures that, even when The Surfer risks going under, it still manages to catch it’s own wave and make it back to shore. Getting there is gross, thrilling and always interesting. A B-picture with A-game.
The Lost Highway Hotel 