Reviewed on May 18th at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival – Midnight Screenings Section. 100 Mins
Genre: Thriller
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon
Director: Lorcan Finnegan
In Irish Cinemas: Now
In The Surfer, Nicolas Cage’s character is never named — he’s credited only as “The Surfer.” That anonymity invites easy assumptions: perhaps this is yet another entry in the catalogue of unhinged, meme-worthy performances that have come to define “Cage Rage” — a genre unto itself, filled with bug-eyed freakouts, surreal monologues, and the kind of gonzo intensity that has delighted YouTube editors for years.
But this film is doing something different. This is not the Cage of bees and bunny suits, nor the caricature that internet compilations love to loop. Instead, The Surfer is a hallucinatory, slow-burning psychological thriller, a sun-bleached, sand-gritted descent into paranoia and disorientation. Directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan, whose previous works (Vivarium in 2019, Nocebo in 2022) similarly probed the edges of reality, the film blends Hitchcockian suspense with psychedelic anxiety. And Cage, in turn, channels less his usual manic persona and more the weary, unravelling obsessions of a Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo or Michael Douglas in Falling: a seemingly ordinary man who finds himself pushed — or perhaps pulled — to the brink.
Here, madness doesn’t just bubble up from within; it’s imposed from without. The threat is external as much as internal. The antagonist force is a clique of aggressive local surfers — sun-scorched, salt-crusted enforcers of an unspoken, tribal order —violently territorial over “their” beach. Imagine the beach-town version of Straw Dogs, Eden Lake, or Bait — even hints of The League of Gentlemen’s eerie small-town insularity. This story is about a beach for “local people,” and everyone else is a target.
Leading the hostile charge is Scally, played with oily menace by Julian McMahon. He’s less a character and more a symbol — a men ‘s-rights demagogue in board shorts, echoing the real-world toxicity of figures like Andrew Tate. His followers revere him, and the town silently enables him, creating an ecosystem of complicity. One minor character even rationalises the violence with grim, offhand logic: “If it stops them beating the Botox out of their wives, so be it.” The rot runs deep.
Cage’s character, meanwhile, is fraying at every seam. He’s trying to buy a house he can’t afford. He wants to reconnect with his estranged family. And above all, he wants a moment’s peace — to catch a wave and, metaphorically, a break. Denied all of these, gaslit by the community and reality itself, he spirals. The film gradually peels away his certainty, layering delusion over frustration, and Cage plays it not with theatrical bombast but with a foggy, sun-stunned bafflement that’s surprisingly restrained. Yes, he slurps beer from a parking lot puddle. Yes, he pockets a rat. But in the Cage lexicon, these are almost subtle flourishes.
Finnegan amplifies this psychological disarray with a distinctive visual style: wide-angle close-ups that distort perspective, saturated colours that pulse with heat, and a dreamlike score by François Tétaz that hums with jazzy unease. The result is a sensory fever dream — a world shimmering with tension, heat, and unreliability. It’s as if the screen itself is dehydrated.
If the final act wobbles slightly — its conclusion feeling more jumbled than deliberate — the journey there is taut, unnerving, and frequently brilliant. The Surfer doesn’t just showcase a more subdued, simmering Cage; it constructs an atmosphere of creeping madness so palpable it could give you sunstroke. This isn’t just a movie about a man going insane. It’s about a world that makes insanity feel like the only rational response.
Overall: 6.5/10
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