Nicolas Cage Goes Entertainingly Mad

There’s no level in hiring Nicolas Cage in case you’re not going to let him rip with a wackadoodle, OTT efficiency, and he duly delivers within the sly, psychological thriller The Surfer. Calibrating his character’s descent into psychological and bodily disarray in order that it occurs by evenly distributed levels, Cage is in solely reasonably demented kind general right here. That fits director Lorcan Finnegan (With out Title, Vivarium) and screenwriter Thomas Martin’s ambitions to name again to and but additionally spoof classic Australian New Wave movies like Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971), dreamtime tales about alienated outsiders.

Poisonous masculinity, the Huge Dangerous de nos jours, additionally appears to be on their thoughts though the performances and cinematic quirks (zooms, leap cuts, all that jazz) are so hammy and gestural there’s nothing refined in regards to the critique. However that’s what makes it enjoyable.

Unfolding largely on a seashore and its adjoining parking zone in Western Australia, however a couple of man who’s trapped by his personal compulsions, The Surfer have to be some of the claustrophobic movies that takes place virtually fully outside. Maintain on, there are a few interiors: a grotty public bathroom, the within of some vehicles, and a shack on the seashore the place native antagonists of the eponymous unnamed hero, the surfer (Cage), hang around. However the frequent zooms into the surfer’s twitchy eyes, sudden flashes again and ahead, and shimmering photographs that appear like they’ve been filmed underwater even when on dry land all recommend the story is likely to be unfolding within the surfer’s head as his sanity unravels.

At first, he looks like simply one other slick American dad, rich and easy as an otter, when first met driving his teenage son (Finn Little) for a surf on Luna Seaside. This specific strip of coast is one the surfer is aware of effectively, as a result of regardless of his totally Los Angeleno vowels and cadence, he grew up round right here, in a home one can see finest whereas within the water, ready to catch a wave. The surfer is in negotiations with the proprietor, a realtor and his personal monetary dealer to purchase his childhood house, however he’s been outbid by a money purchaser and wishes to lift one other 100K in Australian {dollars}.

Cage injects a whiff of barely managed desperation into these early scenes, suggesting the surfer could also be much less put collectively than the cream go well with and silver Lexus recommend. Within the movie’s press notes, Finnegan and Martin discuss being partially impressed by the basic 1968 movie The Swimmer, an adaptation of a John Cheever quick story that stars Burt Lancaster as a seemingly rich suburban man trying to “swim” by way of his neighbors’ swimming pools to get again to his household. The swimmer encounters more and more hostile receptions on the homes he visits, suggesting issues aren’t all they appear.

The same slow-reveal dynamic is at play right here, on high of the apparent aquatic theme, solely the hostility is there proper from the beginning. When the surfer and his child hit the seashore with their boards, they encounter growling, menacing locals who hold repeating the mantra, “Don’t reside right here, don’t surf right here.” Scally (Julian McMahon), the sinisterly smiley chief of the native gang who go by the juvenile identify the Bay Boys, politely tells the surfer and his child they’ve to go away because the browsing right here is for locals solely.

However there’s nothing stopping the surfer from hanging out within the parking zone up the cliff, an asphalt jungle with its personal territorial, dog-eat-dog ecosystem. There, the surfer meets Fitz (Nic Cassim), additionally described as The Bum ultimately credit. (A lot of the characters are labelled “The [something]” there, even when named within the dialogue.) Little by little, the longer the surfer stays close to the seashore, the extra he loses his possessions and begins to resemble bereaved father Fitz. First, the surfer’s board is stolen, then his cellphone, his watch and so forth, clearly slightly sanity draining away every time.

Like a grizzled gunslinger who normally rides alone (assume, as an example, of the one he performed in The Outdated Approach lately), Cage is commonly solid as remoted males today and works for lengthy stretches onscreen alone. Hogging the highlight, the way in which we love to observe him work, he goes to city with the surfer’s psychological unzipping because the character turns into at odds not simply with the Bay Boys however the warmth, dehydration and starvation, and the native fauna themselves. On the danger of spoiling the movie’s huge and finest gross-out scenes, look out for the rat. That every one matches effectively with the Australian setting, a continent filled with magnificence but in addition extra lethal snakes and spiders and parts hostile to people than you may shake a stick at.

In the long run, the movie feels too rollicking and self-parodying to be taken significantly, nevertheless it strikes simply the proper tone to make it a enjoyable Midnight film for movie festivals, which is strictly the way it was programmed in Cannes. A minimum of it seems to be nice, with very on-point modifying and one other trendy visible collaboration between Finnegan and DP Radek Ladczuk, who shot Finnegan’s final Nocebo, additionally a blended bag, in addition to The Babadook.