The Irish director Lorcan Finnegan broke through with carefully controlled genre propositions: 2019's Vivarium, the one about the too-perfect living community with Jesse Eisenberg, and 2022's Nocebo, the one about alternative medicines starring Eva Green. Here, armed with a singular Thomas Martin script and doubtless emboldened by his star and executive producer, he goes well and truly for broke. The colour is saturated to the max; the framing deliberately erratic, distractible. Even still images fall subject to a visual ripple effect - some way beyond the usual heathaze - that turns dry land into water. Cage does something with his mouth that recalls Napoleon Dynamite at his most hyperventilating. Gradually, the movie pushes past reality into hyper-reality, perhaps even parable: we can't help but note the contrast between Cage's increasingly tattered white suit and McMahon's diabolical, MAGA-red robes, and how our hero, stripped of all material possessions, is set to wander in this wilderness. "Where were you when I needed you?," asks one minor character late on, echoing the Biblical verses about footsteps in the sand, so memorably reworked by Half Man Half Biscuit. The Surfer is very knowing about the type of cult film it wants to be, continually shouting "pick me! pick me!" at any weirdo with a Letterboxd account, but it's never less than unpredictable, which is a boon; I watched it with a broad, sometimes bemused grin on my face, happy indeed to have been reconnected with the Cage of 1992's Honeymoon in Vegas, the hapless soul desperately striving to do right in a world growing ever loopier. To finish where I began, as any true Zen master seeks: Finnegan and Martin demonstrate a wisdom beyond even the great David Milch in recognising strained surfing-as-life metaphors play better at 100 minutes than they did over ten long, increasingly impenetrable hours of HBO.
The Surfer opens in selected cinemas from Friday.
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