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In the 1968 film, originally transfixing, The swimmerBarely dried Burt Lancaster; Australian thriller The surferNicolas Cage has trouble approaching water. The connection is that the two films are existential dramas on extremely confident men who are gradually stripped of their most vulnerable and vulnerable nucleus – and the stylistic fulfillments of the new film by Irish director Lorcan Finnegan very much suggest a tribute to the knowledge of Frank Perry's social fable.
That said, The surfer is a very original piece that works in its own increasingly crazy terms. Cage plays an anonymous man (identified in credits only as “the surfer”) who returns to the Australian coastal community of his childhood, where he is determined to buy a ignition house. He also wants to present his teenage son to the glories of surfing there, but they meet a bunch of local men who will not leave them near the shore, rumble: “Do not live here – do not surf here.”
Not easily intimidated, the surfer remains in the parking lot by the sun, although everything that is transformed would scare away a sensible person; Even trying to buy a coffee becomes a station in your personal ordeal. His surfboard is stolen, his car battery dies, he loses his shoes and many other things, almost everyone he meets seems determined to make his life misery.
Thomas Martin's script generally establishes a balance between black comedy and nightmarish thriller in a Straw dogs Vein, while the surfer's meetings with the worker ankle of the beach-barbie blokeosphere (Julian McMahon) take a dark and ritualistic dimension-something underlined by McMahon meeting like a smiling mix of Jordan Peterson and Lucifer himself.
For the most part, the film maintains its own transcendental logic of concern, but at some point, it begins to feel as if Cage and Finnegan immerse itself to push things in ever more wild registers. Even thus, following a path of GQ-man's arrogance in arrogance to the unleashed abjection of the soul, Cage is as convincing and as coherent as in one of his best recent works.
The rigorous photography of Radzek Ladczuk plus a partition of François Tétaz who flows with the quasi-californian luxuriance of the 1960s adds to the attraction of a film which may seem tense, vague, charming and strangely repulsive in turn. But if you promote energies and exotic, you will want to catch this wave.
★★★★ ☆
In British cinemas of May 9 and in American cinemas now
