BREAKING POINT

'The Surfer' allows Nicolas Cage to go wild in the Australian heat then leaves him hanging, writes Clarisse Loughrey, while 'The Wedding Banquet' marries laughs and feeling

- Clarisse Loughrey

The triggers for Nicolas Cage’s vengeful ire have grown increasingly obscure of late. Normally, he’s battling to get back his wife (2018’s Mandy), his daughter (2012’s Stolen), or his granddaughter (2011’s Drive Angry). Now he’s battling to get back his favourite hog (2021’s Pig) and, with The Surfer, his favourite longboard. Yet, these films, inevitably, offer the same sell: people come for the Cage-ness of it all, the bug-eyed grimace, the air karate chop, the erratic, ever-escalating inflection. It’s the inevitable metric by which they’re judged.

But as Cage grows more violent over smaller transgressions, directors have offered him a little more room to work. The Surfer is what you might call a slow-burn Cage. There’s the manic, hollering prize at the end (and even a line of dialogue worthy of a future meme), but also plenty of the actor’s more undervalued speciality – the expression of gargantuan helplessness, the look of a fish who’s been thrown to land and left to die.

Here, he plays an Australian-born, American-raised businessman returning to his birthplace with the intention of buying his family’s old beach home. Life has turned cruel for him: his estranged wife is shacked up with another man, his son (Finn Little) seems distant, and his boss is wondering why he turned up to their last meeting with no shoes or socks.

The plan, then, is to come back and reroot himself, to reconstruct his innocence. Only, the second he turns up to his old surfing haunt, the local “Bay Boys” get up in his face and bellow, “don’t live here, don’t surf here”. He’s become a stranger to everywhere. When the Bay Boys swipe his surfboard, he’s left haunting the beach car park.

"‘The Surfer’ is about individualism and masculinity, about the desire to own and claim space"