On paper, The Surfer is the platonic ideal of a Nicolas Cage movie. It’s a showcase for one of his trademark uninhibited performances, and in the sort of role he plays so well — a lone man fighting impossible forces, his sanity eroding until he’s a sweating, blubbering, screaming mess.
Cage is literally a Man with No Name, a businessman who has returned for Christmas to the Australian town where he was born and raised, and where he hopes to buy his oceanview family home for a pretty penny. In between negotiation calls, he takes his teenage son surfing on the secluded beach where he caught waves as a kid. This particular stretch of shore is now presided over by a self-imposed svengali named Scally (Julian McMahon), whose macho followers bully and assault any tourists who dare step on their sand.
They humiliate Cage in front of his son, and that, compounded by an ongoing divorce and the pressure of the real estate deal, tips him over into madness. His focus narrows to a pinpoint: those men on the beach. He haunts the parking lot overlooking their hangout spot. Scally’s thugs beat him up. They steal his shoes and trick him into walking over broken glass. The sun is always beating down, cooking the asphalt.
Why doesn’t Cage just hop into his Lexus and leave? We’re not supposed to ask questions like that, because there’s a sense that he’s in some kind of purgatory. He loses small items of convenience — his watch, his phone — and then his car disappears, and it chips away at what makes him him. The cops and the locals are no help; if anything, they’re on Scally’s side. They gawk at and taunt our hero, in leering close-ups designed to make us wonder if it’s all in his head.
With its sun-baked surrealism, The Surfer resembles one of those psychedelic revisionist westerns of the Vietnam era, with an outsider up against a posse that has a small town in its grip. But here, the posse’s aggressive ethos are intriguing to the outsider, although the film doesn’t interrogate that as much as it should. It also feels like a 21st-century riff on Ozploitation classics like Wake in Fright and Long Weekend, and in its depiction of a village under the thumb of a cult, it’s a better remake of The Wicker Man than the one in which Nicolas Cage himself appeared.
That 1973 movie built inexorably to a climax that carried both allegorical weight and pit-in-the-stomach dread. The Surfer tries to do that, too, but it’s trying to be headier than any ol’ down-and-dirty genre picture. The director, Lorcan Finnegan, previously made a film called Vivarium, also about characters trapped within social constructs made literal — in that case, a ticky-tacky neighborhood that represented suburban and domestic conformity. The Surfer, meanwhile, is gesturing toward themes of the self-imposed rites of masculinity, and of sons transforming into their fathers.
It seems to me that both of these films come with a built-in killswitch: Because they’re so intent on following their metaphors to their most logical extremes, their third-act horrors don’t land with any flesh-and-blood weight. It’s best to simply bask in the style of the movie, like a weird day at the beach. Marvel at Nic Cage as he flails and gnashes his teeth and tears them into this material — and into the flesh of a rat. It’s that kind of movie.
Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 here on KPBX.