What the Heck Is Going on in Nicolas Cage’s New Film ’The Surfer?‘
I cannot stop watching the trailer for The Surfer, the new psychological thriller starring Nicolas Cage.
The preview went up on YouTube on Wednesday, February 26, and by Monday, March 3, it had generated 1.2 million views. I probably account for one-quarter of those, as I’ve been mindlessly rewatching it again and again, soaking in every hilarious and eye-popping frame.
What’s not to love? There’s surfing. There are hyper-agro Australian surfer dudes. There are strong undercurrents of paranoia, shamanism, and even cult worship. And of course there’s Nicolas Cage, clad in a neoprene wetsuit, doing what he does best: freaking out, melting down, and acting like a lunatic. The Surfer appears to be a meme reservoir of the zany, over-the-top acting we’ve come to expect from the Academy Award-winning actor over the past decade or so.
Cage screams, eye-bulges, and stares into the camera, mouth agape. He also wields a tire iron like a club, bludgeons a bad guy with a signpost, and forces another one to eat a dead rat while screaming “EAT THE RAT!” The trailer makes The Surfer appear to be equal parts Wicker Man (“AAAGH! NOT THE BEES!“) and Endless Summer. Someday, we may all text Nicolas Cage GIFs from this crazy movie to one another.
The trailer for The Surfer does kinda sorta tell a story, too, and it’s one that’s laid out in the promotional copy that accompanies the film.
A man returns to the idyllic beach of his childhood to surf with his son. But his desire to hit the waves is thwarted by a group of locals whose mantra is “don’t live here, don’t surf here.” Humiliated and angry, the man is drawn into a conflict that keeps rising in concert with the punishing heat of the summer and pushes him to his breaking point.
I assume that the breaking point here is assault with a rodent.
But in truth I hope there’s more to The Surfer than just Nicolas Cage memes and a story of dad-revenge. It’s been 66 years since Gidget, and over the decades, Hollywood’s portrayal of surfing has occasionally been subverted and re-examined. Even the 1991 blockbuster Point Break was vaguely subversive by portraying its hunky surfers as adrenaline-addicted bank robbers. I think that the surfing subgenre is ready to be tinkered with again.
Uh oh, here come the bad guys. (Photo: Roadside Attractions/The Surfer)
The Surfer trailer drops breadcrumbs that it may attempt to do this. It touches on some of the familiar tropes found in mainstream portrayals of surfing on TV and in movies. The film is directed by Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan, who made his feature debut with the 2019 sci-fi thriller Vivarium, which I have not seen but apparently paints a bleak picture of parenthood.
The Surfer trailer opens with a Cage voiceover. “You can’t stop a wave. Born in a storm, way out to sea, it’s pure energy. And it’s all building to this breaking point.” This is the familiar mumbo jumbo that Hollywood loves to attach to surfing, to highlight the metaphysical connection that surfers have to the waves, the ocean, and maybe even the cosmos. Yeah—stuff that normies like you and me will never truly understand.
Think Patrick Swaze’s Bodhi from Point Break saying, “Surfing’s the source. Can change your life. Swear to God.” Or the opening scene of the 2007 HBO show John from Cincinnati, where Bruce Greenwood mysteriously levitates above the beach.
The next trope, of course, is the whole localism thing. In The Surfer trailer, neighborhood Aussies terrorize Cage by vandalizing his car, stealing his board, and potentially forcing him slurp an unidentified liquid off of the parking lot. In some scenes, the antagonists appear more like cult worshippers than buddies from the local break. Their antics are a few notches more menacing than that of bad guys (and real-life surf celebrities) Laird Hamilton and Gerry Lopez in the 1987 cult favorite North Shore. But it’s also in-line with the surfing scene in Lords of Dogtown, where the locals remove the carburetor from a car owned by an out-of-towner and drop it into the ocean.
And finally there’s the activity of surfing itself: magical and carefree, riding a pristine wave along the sun-dappled coastline. It’s what Nicolas Cage’s character hopes to pass down to his son—well, prior to getting tangled up with all of the violence, fear, and loathing.
How will these traditional tropes mix with paranoia, cult worship, and rat eating? We will have to see. The Surfer hits theaters on May 1. I intend to be there on opening night. I’ll leave my wetsuit at home.
The post What the Heck Is Going on in Nicolas Cage’s New Film ’The Surfer?‘ appeared first on Outside Online.
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