In UK cinemas today, director Lorcan Finnegan’s surfer-less surf movie The Surfer is the perfect metaphor for 2025 – and not in a nice way.
In the summer of 2022, UK temperatures reached an unfortunate high of 40.3°C. That July, I remember wandering the streets of south London in a daze, every patch of grass a golden-brown graveyard, watching a man vomit water into a bin as a wildfire ripped through the capital a dozen miles to the north. Faced suddenly with a vision of a climate apocalypse, the film that kept coming to mind was George Miller’s Mad Max. Ever since, I’ve found the comparatively weak sun of the English summer more than a little unnerving.
But while plenty of films in the Australian New Wave understand the mental terror of the country’s omnipresent sunshine, The Surfer, in UK cinemas this weekend, seems to get that fear better than most. Returning to the coastline of his youth to spend some quality surfing time with his son, a nattily dressed businessman (Nic Cage) finds his childhood home overrun by a gang of terrifying localists intent on keeping outsiders away. Like the Wasteland of Miller’s most famous franchise, the film’s world is a psychedelic mix of macho insanity and violence, from exploding cars to force-feeding rats – all taking place under a blazing December sun.
What starts as a typical macho revenge movie premise quickly defies expectations. For one thing, the film contains barely any surfing. Instead, The Surfer’s conflict is less violent than psychological, as Cage is slowly driven to the edge by a combination of his enemies’ teasing and the mental effects of spending all day in the summer sun.
What physical conflict there is stems more from Cage’s failing body than the youths we’d expect to see kicking his butt. As a flat car battery takes away his access to air conditioning, our hero hardly seems to sweat – dehydrated as anything, his dry forehead doesn’t boil in the sun, it bakes. When he finds the nearby water fountain guarded by an angry dog, he quenches his thirst on the orange discharge of a bathroom tap. He returns, hours later, to vomit most of it back up again.
All the while, the film’s psychedelic presentation hints at Cage’s mental decline. An eerie, discordant score kicks in as the sun beats down – the audio equivalent of heat haze takes hold as Cage takes to the bushes to feed on the flesh of a dead rat. The distancing effect of the film’s oddness only makes its scatological body horror all the more affecting. It proves so affecting because it shows how the mental and physical strains of the scenario become interlinked. All this physical pain could be over, the camera seems to say, if only Cage thought about this differently…
The Surfer, of course, gives an audience plenty of reasons to feel afraid. Its human antagonists, Julian McMahon and his rabid cult of part-time corporatists and lost boys, probably feel closer to home now than they did when the film premiered at the Cannes film festival last year. Where previous ne’er-do-wells in the newly resurgent psychological thriller genre (Don’t Worry Darling, Blink Twice) saw men hiding their psychopathy behind technology or mind-altering drugs, here violent thuggery is proudly on display. Led by a Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate-ish figure, their cruelty for cruelty’s sake feels like more of an echo of a modern-day news report than it would have done as recently as 2024.
But even as The Surfer comes to its inevitably violent conclusion, it’s not the firebombs and fisticuffs that stick in the memory. The decidedly anxious film captures anxiety as an all-encompassing phenomenon – mental and physical symptoms fighting it out in the same body, its events all overwhelmed by an equally all-encompassing heat. The maximalism of a very Australian-feeling film (written and directed by Irishmen) proves the perfect metaphor for the feeling of hitting mental capacity.
All that said, The Surfer is still a lot of fun. It might just be the scariest film of the year, too.
