Nicolas Cage and Julian McMahon are terrific on this atmospheric Australian thriller.
PLOT: A middle-aged businessman (Nicolas Cage) returns to the idyllic seaside of his childhood to reconnect along with his son and Australian roots. Nonetheless, he discovers that the seaside is now dominated by an area surf gang, who refuse to let non-locals hit the waves.
REVIEW: Australian cinema has a protracted historical past of psychological dramas that probe the psyche of the Aussie male. North American audiences have all the time been considerably taken with the stereotypical macho Australian. For proof, one want solely word their outsized influence on the movie business, with most of the greatest stars being of Australian descent, like Mel Gibson, Hugh Jackman, Chris Hemsworth, Russell Crowe, and lots of others. But, as a lot as they appear to have a good time their tough and tumble nature, their films have all the time been extra introspective about such issues, and director Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer matches into that mould.
Just like the Aussie New Wave traditional, Wake in Fright, The Surfer follows an outsider’s entry right into a extremely tribalized neighborhood. Whereas Nicolas Cage’s unnamed surfer is meant to have grown up within the space, he’s shed any giveaways of his former identification. It’s clearly a deliberate option to have the very American Cage play the function with none trace of an Australian accent, and he’s made as much as look very completely different from the suntanned, younger, macho surfers he runs afoul of.
In Finnegan’s movie, our ritual character slowly will get stripped of all the weather that join him to his former life over the course of the movie, beginning along with his fancy Lexus, his mobile phone, his marriage ceremony ring, his watch, and even – finally – his sanity. It will get to the purpose that you just even begin to query what the fact of the movie is, with Cage glorious at depicting a person slowly reverting to a distinct sort of existence. He’s all the time been maximalist in his strategy to characterization (when it requires it – he can be brilliantly introspective – like in Pig), and that is certainly one of his larger performances, though he pulls again when crucial. Even nonetheless, there are some gnarly Cage scenes, reminiscent of when he gnaws at a rat’s corpse and succumbs to depravity.
The film additionally advantages tremendously from the presence of former Nip/Tuck star Julian McMahon, who returns to his Australian roots as Scally, the sort of pseudo patriarch of the surf hooligans. He advocates to his followers that, to be a person, you additionally must be taught to undergo, along with his followers always chanting “surf…suffer” again and again. McMahon cuts a dynamic determine right here, with him carrying a putting crimson gown and seeming the picture-perfect best of the macho Australian male.
Finnegan’s film additionally detours into psychedelia, with the attractive, sun-kissed visuals by Radzek Ladczuk getting trippier because the movie goes on. The seaside our hero desires to surf is portrayed as otherworldly in its magnificence, even when the neighborhood of alphas that rule it are something however inviting. Notably, one of many few individuals to point out the surfer any kindness is a photographer with Aboriginal roots (The Sapphires’s star Miranda Tapsell).
Whereas The Surfer does go off the rails a bit in its last act, which drops the movie’s surreal aspect and devolves right into a extra typical thriller, it’s nonetheless an fascinating watch. The chemistry between Cage and McMahon is particularly absorbing, and it ought to discover loads of followers when Roadside Sights and Lionsgate put it out later this spring.
