A man returns to the place he grew up to surf with his son, gets humiliated and slowly starts spiralling out of control.
Trippy, paranoid, and somehow poetic. The classic title font, the music that accompanies it and instructs you on how to feel, the abstract shots, the American accent contrasting with the Australian one, the zoom-ins and the close-ups… Well, mix all that with the repeated and exaggerated bravado and bullying against Nicolas Cage and the constant bad news he keeps receiving, and it’s a bomb waiting to go off. But does it?
The Surfer builds up hatred throughout! An hour and a half of real unnecessary harshness, hallucinations, and paranoia blend smoothly with trauma into an explosive cocktail that starts as one drink and becomes… something else. Wait and you’ll see.
All the audiovisual elements work like a Swiss watch. See the fountain covered in faeces, Cage’s reactions to it, the bird’s reactions to him, which seem to mock him too, like life itself, and the background music that accompanies the scene. There will be sequences where you, too, will want to laugh but will be ashamed to do so due to the tragicomedy of madness. What’s real, what isn’t, what happened and what didn’t, when the build-up turned into climax, when the initial dream started and when the hallucination and trauma kicked in… all in one trippy film called… The Surfer.
Congratulations to writer Thomas Martin and director Lorcan Finnegan for creating such a brilliant film. Congratulations also to Cage and the sorely missed and beautiful person, Julian McMahon. They went toe to toe, and their audience came out the winner…
RIP Julian McMahon. You rode amazing waves!
Thanks for reading!
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