There is a scene where Nicolas Cage fills a bottle with cloudy water from a public tap and tries to drink it. Shortly after he is about to eat a dead rat. Neither of them is the strangest image in the film, and that says enough about the terrain in which it moves.The Surfer‘, a psychological thriller that had a very discreet run in theaters in 2025 and now, a year and a half later and since July 17, it shines as one of the strangest pieces in the summer catalog of Prime Video.
The film follows an unnamed man (Cage) who takes his teenage son to the Australian beach where he surfed as a child. He wants to buy the family house on the cliff, the same one he grew up in before his father died. The welcome is not what was expected: a group of local surfers, the Bay Boys, led by the charismatic Scally (Julian McMahon, whom we remember from ‘Nip and Tuck’ and The Fantastic Four – no, not that one, the other one… no, that one neither, the other one -), prevents him from entering the water with a mantra that is repeated throughout the film: “If you don’t live here, you don’t surf here.” And what starts as a one-time humiliation turns into a spiral of harassment with the heat of the Australian summer in the background.
The Irishman Lorcan Finnegan, director of the film, is not a new name for fans of psychological tension films. Before this, he signed the magnificent ‘Vivarium’, with Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots trapped in a residential neighborhood that repeats itself ad infinitum, and ‘Nocebo Effect’ (2022), with an Eva Green affected by a suffocating exotic disease. In all three titles he works with a closed and oppressive space that begins as everyday and ends up becoming a trap.
And this time the film has an excellent plus: the Australian sun, which has given us so many magnificent works of extreme oppression, such as ‘Long Weekend’ or ‘Waking Up in Hell’. On this occasion, in addition, the disturbing desert of the country is contrasted with the beaches where Cage goes, allowing himself to give one of his best manic and out of character performances, for the first time in an environment that does him absolute justice.
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