Home and well away: "The Surfer"

The agreeably strange The Surfer is John from Cincinnati goes Walkabout (and then has cause to Wake in Fright). Nic Cage, at his most sunkissed, is an American businessman who, in Christmas week, returns to the spot on Australia's Gold Coast where he grew up so as to a) clinch a property deal and b) introduce his teenage son to the way of the waves. Trouble awaits. Our hero's twinkly-eyed, quasi-mystical vision of enlightenment through surf may be the only real dream he has left, given that we glean his ex-wife (and the mother to said son) has already moved on, he's considered a liability at work, and has taken to sleeping in his car. Worse, his plans keep smashing up against the reality of thuggish local yahoos, operating out of a surf club run by Dannii Minogue's ex Julian McMahon, who abide by the motto "you don't live here, you don't surf here". Matters escalate. Meandering pathetically around the beach, our hero is divested of first his surfboard, then his shoes, then his watch, then his marbles. Two things become clear. One: the film invites reception as a latter-day Western of sorts, one that transforms a few square feet of sand and water, and the cherishably humdrum municipal car park looking out onto them, into a workable analogue for any Main Street. (Another alternative title suggests itself: Bad Day at Hanging Rock.) Two: much as Sinners is horror-plus, The Surfer is Western-plus, the kind of gamble perhaps only a Cage would be prepared to take, carrying us all back in the direction of Dog Eat Dog and Mandy territory. Any future retrospective of this actor is going to be some wild hell of a thing, requiring detailed programme notes and Dramamine.

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.