Toxic masculinity gets menacingly vibrant and sun-soaked in The Surfer
“You can’t stop a wave. It’s pure energy.” What a great line to start a film, especially when the line is delivered with philosophical sincerity by Nicolas Cage to kickstart a gonzo psychedelic thriller. The Surfer is the new film from Lorcan Finnegan (Vivarium) and it takes its opening line to heart, stylistically and performatively. Finnegan submerges The Surfer in 1970s era orange and turquoise and utilizes Cage’s unique talent for capturing a character’s descent into madness. The result is a blistering portrayal of toxic masculinity.
Nicolas Cage plays “The Surfer,” a man who returns to his Australian coastal hometown to surf with his son and purchase his grandfather’s house overlooking the beach. While The Surfer has been away, the beach has been taken over by a cult of young men, ideologically led by a local guru, Scally, played by Julian McMahon. The gang’s motto is “don’t live here, don’t surf here,” which they menacingly tell The Surfer before taking his surfboard and preventing him from enjoying the beach. Humiliated, emasculated, yet unwavering in his futile desire to rectify his crumbling life (which we understand through subtle details along the way), The Surfer remains in the parking lot above the beach and slowly goes mad in the scorching heat as he tries numerous fruitless avenues to claim his right to enjoy the beach, buy the house, and get back his stolen surfboard.
The Surfer is a film built on sensory editing: a mesmerizing sonic soundscape accompanied by François Tétaz’s psychedelic score, effective cinematography filled with saturated colors, and tight close-ups of increasingly sun-soaked sweaty and dirty faces. Throughout the film, we know that the Surfer’s reprieve is always just an arm’s length away, whether in the vast refreshing ocean or the evading access to food and drink. Even the dialogue has an off-kilter, somewhat ADR’d philosophizing rhythm to it, echoing Australian cult classics like the original Mad Max films and Romper Stomper. Like those films, The Surfer is portraying the stubborn and fragile nature of masculinity. The Surfer shields himself behind the standards of a civilized world in an attempt to confront forces that don’t abide by the rules of civility. Desperate to piece his broken life back together and prove his manhood, he gradually gets stripped of humanity and ventures towards heat stroked insanity in the process.
Unfortunately, The Surfer has a contrived ending that doesn’t quite emotionally match the escalating tensions that precede it. The film’s runtime is also padded by an extended hallucinogenic montage when The Surfer finally confronts the beach cult, a sequence that feels less intentional than the rest of the film. Even Cage’s increasingly unhinged performance gets marginally restrained in the final act, a frustrating filmmaking and writing decision when some of Cage’s most recent performances have such memorable capstones, including the endings of Mandy, Pig, and Longlegs. But maybe that’s part of the point that Finnegan is trying to make. Watching The Surfer reminds us how easily toxic masculinity slips into depravity, and giving that resulting ideology a fully gratifying conclusion may have been more than it deserves.
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The Surfer opens in theaters on Friday, May 2nd.
