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The Surfer

The Surfer is an Australian/Irish co-production, filmed in the south of WA. If you can get over the premise that Nicolas Cage was born in Australia and gained an American accent after the age of about 15, then maybe you'll go with this a bit more than I did. Cage stars as the otherwise unnamed Surfer, who returns to Lunar Bay (Yallingup) to buy his old family home that overlooked the beach where he used to surf.

Upon arriving with his teenage son, intent on having a surf, he find the beach occupied by a gang called the Bay Boys. He's very quickly told to fuck off and that if you "don't live here, don't surf here." After taking his son home, he returns to the carpark above the beach and here's where events start to go off the rails.

The surfer's board is stolen, then his shoes, his car battery dies, his phone battery too, he trades his sunglasses for a pair of binoculars from an old beach bum with a grievance. This idea of him being unable or unwilling to leave this beach carpark is fun and the ever increasing circles of loss and creeping madness are a nice touch.

Thomas Martin's script though, is quite ropey, interchanging Aussie vernacular with American (e.g. "I'll do you a solid") and Cage's confusion midway through seeps off the screen to the audience - Is all this real? Is he actually the old bum with the missing dog? The theme of scared little men acting out their pathetic alpha fantasies is not too subtly presented, but Julian McMahon plays the 'cult' leader with an appropriate level of smarmy unpleasantness.

They are too many shots of Aussie animals (I stopped counting after a lizard, a kangaroo, a spider, a kookaburra, a snake and an echidna) and the travelogue beach scenes are surely enough to satisfy Screenwest and by extension, Tourism WA.

There are big Wake in Fright vibes to this, a very anachronistic 70s style - the credits, the music, loads of facial close-ups, lens flare galore. Cage is back to his snarly behaviour, getting filthy and hammy for the benefit of the film, though not always believably.

The climax made sense in the realms of this self-contained world but I didn't quite follow Cage's intentions regarding his acceptance of his new position within the group. Maybe he had a plan or perhaps his goal of surfing that break was the be all and end all. Anyway, the final scene removes the need to wonder, as you'll see when you get there.

The Surfer opens across the country on May 15th - in Perth at the Luna and Palace cinemas (with a special preview screening at the Luna on Sunday May 11th).

See also:

Sandy Harbutt's Stone (1974) is a grotty, ugly slice of 70s Australiana and Ted Kotcheff's iconic Wake in Fright (1971) is what The Surfer aspires to be.

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