Rating: R | Runtime: 100 minutes
Release Date: May 2nd, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Lionsgate / Roadside Attractions
Director(s): Lorcan Finnegan
Writer(s): Thomas Martin

I’m just trying to help you wake up and accept who you are.

The first three-quarters of director Lorcan Finnegan and writer Thomas Martin’s The Surfer plays like two ships crossing in the night. What we must ask ourselves while watching is whether they are reality and nightmare or fantasy and reality.

To take things literally is to presume the former. The unnamed “Surfer” (Nicolas Cage) is a successful American-raised Australian returning home to buy his childhood house and make good on a promise he made before his life imploded in divorce. This is the dream he’s clung to for decades. The one he believes will make all his pain and sacrifice worth it. Just as he’s about to cross the finish line, however, it all begins to fall apart. The locals tell him he can’t surf on the beach. His real estate agent says another offer on the house has beaten his. And his broker doesn’t think the bank will increase their loan.

So, “Surfer” is at his wit’s end. He’s desperate. Stubborn. He remains at the beach partly to be close when his broker calls back about the money and partly to assuage his ego and pride that he belongs. That it’s his birthright. That these bullies have no authority over what he’s allowed to do. But this confidence is hollow. A façade he’s cultivated within a world dictated by suits and money. A world unlike the one he’s thrust himself into, one full of physically aggressive toxic men led by Scally (Julian McMahon). Here “Surfer” is powerless. So much so that he inevitably lets them erase his identity under the blazing sun.

Take things figuratively, however, and everything we’ve been told might not be real. Maybe “Surfer” never was a success. Never had the money to buy that house. Never brought his son for a surf. Maybe that sun has driven him so far off the deep end that we’ve been watching from the vantage point of his delusion and Scally’s rambunctious horde are actually stripping away the fantasy to remind him who he really is. The nightmare “Surfer’s” life has devolved into is therefore made into the reality he’s been trying to forget. He believes Scally is his enemy, but he’s the one causing trouble by refusing to accept the truth.

Finnegan weaves these two possibilities together in ways that allow both to be legitimate interpretations depending on your level of optimism versus pessimism and where he and Martin eventually decide to take us. The collision builds the paranoia and danger to a fever pitch until nothing we see can be taken on faith. Because either way you slice it, the entirety of “Surfer’s” journey is false. It’s either one giant hallucination blurring the lines between him and the bum he’s beginning to transform into (Nicholas Cassim) or one giant elaborate conspiracy orchestrated by Scally to break his mind and spirit.

That duality leads to the third act’s question of why “Surfer” cares so much. Scally’s is hardly a group of men you should aspire to join. These are unleashed animals who talk about deprogramming each other from society’s political correctness in order to rebuild their apparently stunted masculinity. It’s about “blowing off steam.” It’s about, as one character puts it, getting their violence out on the beach so they don’t go home and “beat the Botox out of their wives.” Is that who “Surfer” wants to be? Is this whole thing a metaphor for his emasculation? Is it actually condoning the localism and, by extension, the tribal nativism that has given rise to a rebirth of white supremacy across the world?

I won’t lie and say I wasn’t worried that Finnegan and Martin had taken a very wrong turn with their messaging once answers begin to come into focus. They sprinkle a lot of clues as to what’s happening via their conflation of “surfer” and “suffer,” so the end result is hardly surprising in its appearance. But it is surprising that it’s so readily embraced. Well, maybe not that surprising considering Cage’s character has gone through the wringer and is allowed a reprieve when embracing violence means saving yourself from being a victim of that violence. The surprise is that, when presented with the choice, he chooses the violence. These bullies hold his dream in their hands, after all.

That’s the real message. Not that we willingly accept evil, but that evil oftentimes wields so much power and control that we don’t realize we’ve accepted it. That’s when this tiny beach becomes a microcosm of America (at least to this American) if not the world and its current, rapid decline into oligarchical authoritarianism. Because that’s what I see in Scally and his men: Nazis. Gatekeepers willing to maim and kill any outsider who dares to set foot on “their” land. I use quotes, of course, since these are white men on a continent of indigenous people their ancestors stole it from. It doesn’t matter that they also turn away other white men like “Surfer.” That’s part of the process of weeding out the “bad ones” to ensure full-fledged loyalty to the cause.

Because it’s all a test. The Surfer is about torturing Nic Cage until all pretense and sanity evaporates to leave his purely primal instincts in charge. That’s when we see who he really is and what he’s truly capable of doing. That’s when he can finally make his choice. Become an animal willing to sell its soul for the dreams that society indoctrinated him to achieve or realize no “reward” is worth relinquishing his humanity. Live large and at the top through cruelty or fight back so everyone can live as equals.

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Nicolas Cage and Julian McMahon in THE SURFER; courtesy of Roadside Attractions.