The Surfer (2025)

**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell
written by Thomas Martin
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw A time or two during Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer, I wondered if it wasn’t at least a spiritual cousin to Frank Perry’s The Swimmer, seeing as how both films offer an overarching metaphor of going home while examining an aimless, tortured masculinity on the existential skids. Indeed, there’s a literary quality to The Surfer that smells like the leather and furniture polish of John Cheever spiced with the postmodern detachment of Alex Garland’s The Beach–which is to say I was never really engaged with The Surfer so much as I was trying to figure out its thesis and its sources as though it were an essay question. Not unlike a test. In demanding an active viewership, it creates disengagement; it’s an irony I haven’t been able to untangle entirely. I’ve felt similarly detached from Finnegan’s recent work: His carefully crafted but arguably airless Vivarium and its follow-up, Nocebo, are so explicitly and dedicatedly about something that the only way out for me is through analyzing them. Here’s the thing: I don’t think they’re complicated. They’re like escape rooms in the sense that it’s possible to exist in a room without wanting to escape it, unless it’s clear the only point of the room is to escape from it. Finnegan’s best work doesn’t do this. His 2011 short film Foxes, in which a woman finds her inner nightbitch in the midnight ritual of wild foxes outside her carefully manicured suburban existence, is About Something, too, of course, and dry critical analysis is a way through it, yet there’s a freedom about it that doesn’t immediately demand a close critical reading. It can just be.

The Surfer of The Surfer is either its eponymous, ostensible hero (Nicolas Cage) or the ostensible antagonist, Scally (Julian McMahon), the leader of a “MANist” cult teaching horrible young men how to become monstrous old men. This is accomplished through pain rituals, ritually hazing a mysterious homeless guy, and, mainly, preventing The Surfer from taking his kid, The Kid (Finn Little), surfing on his beach. This matters to The Surfer because he grew up surfing this beach. It matters to Scally to keep him from it because otherwise his authority would be challenged in front of his charges. And it doesn’t matter much to anyone else, because every other character in the film is a part of the riddle Finnegan has conjured on the way to saying a Big Thing about legacies, fatherhood, and the importance of not only belonging somewhere but also knowing where you’re from. See? Simple.

Simple enough that, like Vivarium and Nocebo again, The Surfer is arguably a very effective short trapped in the body of a feature–one that has moments where it’s as tense and regionally uncomfortable as Wake in Fright, playing on an outsider’s discomfort with barbarous local custom, but many more that are merely repetitious, ludicrous (see: a side-plot involving an evil barista and a cellphone that needs charging), or on-the-nose, like a lecture The Surfer receives about how boys need MAN-ist gurus to focus their rascally energies towards proper, man-like pursuits. I mean, as if I didn’t already know we’re fucked beyond all recognition of fuckery. That’s the thing with The Surfer: it ultimately doesn’t have anything to say but says what it says strenuously. It’s like the guy unaccustomed to weed who has something spectacularly important to tell you right now. Cage’s growing frustration as he finds no sympathetic shoulders to lean on, his marriage on the rocks, his kid embarrassed by him, and his plan to buy back his Rosebud–his childhood home, where he was happy for the last time–thwarted repeatedly. You could say it’s like a Kafka if Kafka’s protagonists ever expressed their outrage as obnoxiously as Nicolas Cage, or you could say this is an interesting contribution to a young director’s interesting filmography that maybe peaked with a short film he made before his feature career even started.