RATING
When Julian McMahon passed away this year at the untimely age of 56, Lorcan Finnegan’s surreal thriller The Surfer took on an unexpected resonance as one of the Charmed and Nip/Tuck actor’s last — and best — film performances. Playing essentially what amounts to a macho cult leader for a gang of rugged Aussie surfer types, he is Finnegan’s tempting, testing Satan in the Desert, a man of lacquered sheen not unlike the wax surface of his surfboard, someone working very hard to suggest an air of imperviousness. His passing makes watching The Surfer an especially acute experience, something director Lorcan Finnegan has already gone to great lengths to achieve, his sun-blanched, aggressive psychological thriller one of the most vivid visual experiences of the year. It’s an ideal film for star Nicolas Cage, too — his over-memed, operatic style lending itself to a project with a lurid hook, but genuine depth and cinematic verve buzzing beneath. It’s of a piece with other recent titles that have hinged on his unique idiosyncrasies — Pig, Dream Scenario, Mandy, Longlegs — buzzy projects seemingly designed to pull the rug out from under those still stuck in the very 2000s belief that Cage is a goofball not to be taken seriously. In doing so, The Surfer continues to emphasise Cage’s extreme importance to the modern industry — there is genuinely no one else doing it quite like he does, a star of an earlier era who has never quite fit the mould, and is all the better for it.
Finnegan’s film takes place entirely in one setting — the fictional Luna Bay, a golden sanded, turquoise-watered Aussie paradise, a beach of such ridiculously attractive properties that it’s probably the manifestation of what you see in your head when you picture ‘the perfect beach’. The Surfer (Cage), is bringing his son there to check out a beachfront property that he’s desperate to purchase, one that he apparently lived in as a child. The issues begin when, attempting to take his son for a surf, he’s accosted by said macho locals, who admonish him with their credo: ‘don’t live here, don’t surf here’. The emasculating humiliation of The Surfer’s rejection sends him into a spiral — stubbornly remaining on-site at the beach’s roasting concrete carpark, he repeatedly attempts to appeal to societal rationality, only for the locals’ tribalism to trigger his descent from milquetoastism into madness, the lines of what is real and what is imagined blurring. The grit and rawness of Australian cinema, with its built-in ability to evoke society’s clash with nature beyond our comprehension, has always been a wellspring for filmmakers willing to interrogate those facades that hold us together, particularly the fragility of masculine identity. Finnegan’s film is thus in conversation with Oz classics like Wake in Fright and Mad Max, Don’s Party and Dead Calm: films that initially project a veneer of functional, colonially-assured fringes of domesticity, only to unravel them in inventive, frequently violent ways. Perhaps the key touchstone for The Surfer, though, is not an Australian film at all, but Frank Perry’s brilliant The Swimmer, one of the great American films. That picture, which features a masterly performance from Burt Lancaster, managed to operate almost entirely within metaphorical scare quotes without compromising its devastating personal portrait, becoming one of the key cinematic statements on the fallibility of male ego — it is not bad company for The Surfer to keep, by any means.
Premiering this month exclusively on Rialto Channel, Australian filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan’s vividly-wrought descent into madness features a typically committed turn from Nicolas Cage, the ideal guide for a descent into hell on earth. Surreal and intense, the film recalls Australian classic Wake in Fright, among others, offering up one of the most distinctive visual experiences of the year.
It’s clear that Finnegan’s film is intended as something of a throwback, from its old-fashioned titling to the syrupy orchestral music that compounds as the film proceeds, to its sixties-cribbing ‘trippy’ visual palette. It makes for a rich, sensual experience, one that doesn’t shirk on violence or ugliness but which nevertheless goes down smoothly. Even when The Surfer is not entirely successful, it is easy to appreciate Finnegan’s intentions. The casting of Cage is a particular boon — his Surfer feels like a natural outlier, an outcast from both his beach-bound past and his current anaesthetised corporate incarnation, compounded by his sore-thumb American accent. One of the great joys about a film like this is watching its central character’s costume degrade — think Scorsese’s After Hours or Rohrwacher’s La Chimera. In The Surfer said costume is an increasingly bedraggled tan suit, not unlike the one Gary Bond wears in Wake in Fright. Beyond that, the film is (thankfully) light on Cage-isms — the director recognises that the actor’s excesses are best dealt out in moderation. Indeed, for much of the early part of the film, Cage’s Surfer is the anchor amidst a chaotic swirl of cartoonishly-rendered supporting characters — the purgatorial Luna Bay a cavalcade of violent testosterone-fuelled assholes misled by a charlatan.
The film’s feverish pitch is not an easily sustainable one, and The Surfer’s most risky stretches teeter toward outright exhaustion. That intentionally highly strung approach is one that largely forgoes nuance of any kind — this film is a brutal series of blows, rather than something designed to gently wash over you. Its lengthy middle section can test your patience — Finnegan’s intention to layer suffering upon The Surfer hits the same point over and over, stripping away the veneer of civility piece by piece, an endurance test that one understands instinctually, but doesn’t necessarily enjoy watching. The canny choice the director makes around the time the film hits its third act is to pull back, and approach the surface. Where the film could have easily driven its damned central character ever further into the dirt, Finnegan instead explores a different trajectory, one that ultimately sets The Surfer apart. It’s gratifying to see this film genuinely investigate the questions it brings forth about the mind-prison of hypermasculinity. ‘This country. Everyone’s in shackles and they’re calling it jewellery, can’t you see it?’, a key character intones toward the end of the film. It’s a telling line. The beach setting becomes an ideal space to probe such issues — Finnegan keeps the glowing ocean constantly out of reach, an oasis that one can only reach through personal liberation. For all its midnight crowd excesses and indignities, The Surfer never forgets to ask questions that’ll keep you up at night.
The Surfer premieres on November 8 at 8:30 PM on the Rialto Channel (Sky, Channel 39). Catch up on Sky Go if you miss it.