Review: "The Surfer"

The Surfer is an offbeat, throwback film that harkens back to the trippy, artsy, independent movies of the Sixties.

It’s a mix of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone TV Series and the classic French New Wave Film La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker in 1962.

Nicolas Cage stars as “The Surfer,” (his character’s credited name), a successful businessman who may or may not have grown up on some expensive childhood beachfront property that he has dreamed of repurchasing. 

Nicolas Cage in "The Surfer" Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

He is a troubled man with a teenage son and an estranged wife who wants to divorce him.  He is in the final, desperate hours of placing a bid on the property, convinced that it will make everything in his life right again.  He finds himself constantly on the phone with his real estate agent, frantically trying to scrape together the funds needed to outbid another potential buyer.  Things aren’t going well.

Matters get substantially worse when he drives his son to the beach near the property where “The Surfer” surfed as a kid.  More than anything, he wants to provide that blissful childhood experience to his teenage son, who he hopes to surprise with the news that he’s buying the hillside property.

Things take an ugly turn when he discovers that his coveted part of the public beach has been taken over by a group of thugs who have claimed it for their own.  They physically threaten him and his son and force them to leave.  He’s infuriated, humiliated and determined to reclaim what he believes is his.

He stakes the place out for the remainder of the film.  It’s a one-location production, the telltale sign of a movie made on a restricted budget.  That in itself, isn’t bad.  What is bad is the preposterousness of what transpires as the story unfolds.

Without giving away too much, “The Surfer” finds himself stranded in the parking lot overlooking the beach, as his life quickly turns into a living hell.  His car battery dies, his cell phone dies, and he finds himself without food or water for several days in the oppressive heat.

Julian McMahon and cast in "The Surfer "Courtesy of Roadside Attractions

The local policeman is, of course in cahoots with the local “Bay Boys,” a group of juvenile delinquents led by an older man who seems to have no other purpose than to live in a beach shack where he and his boys endlessly party and surf, 24/7.  They physically attack any intruders with the aid of their vicious guard dog. 

While “The Surfer’s” simple solution, early on, would be to just get in his car and drive away, he decides instead to stay and fight even though he loses his cell phone, wedding ring and car in the process.

His life is reduced to a torturous hell on earth that includes drinking horribly tainted water from a bathroom sink, dumpster diving trash cans for maggot-infested scraps and killing and eating a rat.

It’s disgusting.  Through it all, Cage does the signature Nicolas Cage comically stunned, dopey expression that he’s done in a dozen films, tracing all the way back to the likeable loser he played in the Cohen Brothers’ Raising Arizona (1987).  He’s made a career out of it.

There is a moment in which “The Surfer” starts to wonder if he is who he thinks he is.  People around him claim to not recognize him.  It’s the moment in “The Twilight Zone” series when Rod Serling himself would step into the frame and begin to narrate.

That doesn’t happen.

It’s not until the very, very end of the film that The Surfer bears a striking resemblance to another piece of Sixties pop culture, the classic French New Wave Film, La Jetée.  It’s not so much an homage to French filmmaker Chris Marker as much as a shameless rip off of one of the most famous, mindbending film twists of the 1960s. Marker’s movie had daring style and groundbreaking vision.  It was entirely composed of black and white still photographs, shoot on 16mm film. 

The Surfer falls far short of being that kind of edgy, badass filmmaking.  It’s the story of a man losing his soul to the Devil (in this case, a monstrous character who goes so far as to wear a red beach hoodie so that his identity cannot possibly be mistaken).

The only hook here is Nicolas Cage, back doing the kind of quirky role that his fans love to see him do.  It borders on the absurd but falls squarely within Cage’s wheelhouse.  Love him or hate him, he’s a one-of-a kind actor with a few, show-stopping  performances that will be around forever.

This isn’t one of them.