For the second month in a row, after the budget post-apocalypse «Arcadian» Nicolas Cage’s star will be shining on the screens of Ukrainian cinemas — this time in the psychological thriller «The Surfer», which was released on May 8. Julian McMahon plays the antagonist of Cage’s character. We offer to find out what happened between the former Ghost Rider and the former Dr. Doom and how interesting it is to watch their confrontation in the review below.
Genre psychological thriller
Director Lorcan Finnegan
Starring Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Finn Little, Nicholas Cassim, Ragel Roman, Miranda Tapsell, Alexandre Bertrand, Justin Rosniak, Charlotte Muggy
Premiere movie theaters
Year of release 2025
Website IMDb
Nicolas Cage’s character (hereinafter — just Surfer) has come to the place where he spent his youth with his teenage son. He is about to close a deal to buy a house that once belonged to his father and is located right on the shore overlooking the velvet ocean.
Meanwhile, the man wants to surf with his son, but on the picturesque Australian beach the boys meets a group of unfriendly young men led by their spiritual advisor Scully. He warns that outsiders have no place here and insists that the uninvited guests leave. The surfer takes his son home and returns to the beach parking lot, hoping to take possession of the property in the near future. But the beach gang is ready to make the unlucky buyer’s life hell.
Another «netflix movie» with Nicolas Cage — is already a characteristic in itself, for example, «movie with Statham» (they even share titles related to a particular type of activity — Cage has, for example, a weatherman, an armed baron, and now a surfer). Strangely enough, the film was honored with a screening at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and then garnered a handful of positive reviews from critics.
At the beginning, «The Surfer» really seems like a promising story about a conflict as fundamental as ever – the first half hour literally flies by in one breath. This doesn’t prevent the odd thought from creeping in that the local arrogant surfers simply don’t know who they’re dealing with yet. In the climax, an angry bearded uncle will take a chainsaw and cut the hostile fools in half. It doesn’t matter that Julian McMahon already has experience with the Silver Surfer invasion.
But instead, the narrative moves in a completely different direction, and at the same time, the initial hope for a normal «human» movie melts away as quickly as the Surfer’s hopes to buy a dream home under the scorching Australian sun. So if you suddenly have a desire to watch a perfectly presentable man gradually turn into a dirty, hungry tramp, there is no better actor for this role than Nicolas Cage.
Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew does not shy away from drinking from a puddle, looking for something useful in a trash can, eating bird eggs found in a nest, enduring constant humiliation and getting into a fierce fight with a rat, which later will not be a sin to have lunch (though this pleasure will be reserved for another character). At some point, it may seem, and the authors strongly encourage this, that the Surfer is an old homeless man whom he met recently, so he doesn’t have a Lexus, and buying a house is just a manifestation of his imagination. At a certain point, all the sufferer will have left is a pair of binoculars hanging lonely around his neck.
In fact, when the film questions the protagonist’s identity, the motif of losing one’s «self» under the pressure of circumstances emerges. For others, the homeless man becomes an archetypal image of «without a face». Moreover, the Surfer himself hardly believes in who he really is. This narrative is reinforced by expressive visual (and audio) exaggerations, when in one scene it seems that literally everyone around him is laughing heartily at the unfortunate man. Even the kukabara seems to be laughing at the bearded man.
The efforts of director Lorcan Finnegan and screenwriter Thomas Martin (who also worked on the mediocre thriller «Prime Target», which we wrote about in March) to squeeze something meaningful out of this story. It turns out to be illegible and somehow stilted. On the one hand, we have a bunch of idiots who promote the cult of masculinity and despise modern social trends that allegedly turn men into rags. On the other hand, we have the traumatized, long-suffering Cage. It is not clear why the thoughts contained here, packaged in a completely wild movie, which is a challenge to watch, should resonate with the viewer.
At the same time, it is impossible not to notice that the painting is technically well done. There is a good attempt at the style of the 70s exposition. There are appropriate visual solutions (Close-ups, camera angles, distorting shots, etc.) that allow us to better feel the suffocating hopelessness, the decline of the individual, framed by a bizarre soundtrack that sounds like a counterpoint to the stupid events on the screen.
In its climax, against the backdrop of onscreen madness, the film briskly achieves the «drug» characteristic (which is quite in the spirit of late Cage) — Finnegan pours in some select psychedelics, and already in it, Nicholas feels like a surfer in the water.
There is always something wrong with these surfers — either they get into a big fight right on the crest of a wave, or pretty blonde almost turns into fodder for a bloodthirsty shark. Now, Nicolas Cage’s character has gotten himself into trouble by taking up a surfboard. It turned out to be atmospheric and exciting at the beginning, but in general, «for a connoisseur». After all, Nicolas Cage himself has nothing to surprise us anymore — he caught his wave a long time ago.
