REVIEW: The Surfer - savage, haunting and truly weird

The Surfer is one of the weirdest films you will see all year, but probably one of the most haunting – a movie which plays with you, leaving you convinced you kind of know where it’s going. But you don’t. You really, really don’t.

Nicolas Cage is a middle-aged man on an unhappy nostalgia trip. His wife has left him. She wants the divorce papers signed. She’s having someone else’s child. And amidst it all the unnamed man heads back to the beach side town in Australia where he grew up (Cage’s Americanness amongst all the Aussies is a little sketchily explained).

The man is desperate to buy a house on Clifftop Drive, but there are plenty of hints that it was hardly the happiest childhood. However, he is hooked on that house – and desperate to surf the waves as he did years and years ago.

However, when he turns up with his largely uninterested son, the locals pretty soon humiliate him, brutally warning him off the beach. The son scarpers. The man stays. You spend the rest of the film wondering why, but as the film unfurls, you see the price he pays. The seemingly successful businessman becomes a tramp living in an abandoned car.

Various cruelties deprive him of his shoes, his wallet, his phone, his money, everything really including his car – and yet he remains desperate to get on that beach, despite the vicious, smiling hostility of the men on the beach. You can’t exactly call them thugs. What makes it so sinister is that you can imagine them being perfectly normal in other circumstances.

Inevitably, you start to wonder just how much the man can take as humiliation is heaped on humiliation. It feels like we are waiting to find out when the worm will turn and what the extent of his revenge will be. But it turns out it’s not that kind of film at all – and maybe that’s what means it sticks in mind. It turns out far to be more interesting than you think it is going to be. And far, far stranger…

Cage does the descent into savagery brilliantly in a distinctly uncomfortable, horribly tense watch.