“It will come again. It will be a swell so big and strong it will wipe clean everything that went before it.”
So says a character in Big Wednesday, John Millius’s masterpiece from 1978. That tale of California surfers – a macho cadre chewed up by the 1960s in Millius’s view – exemplifies US culture’s tendency to mysticise the business of riding waves. You got it in the underrated TV series John from Cincinnati. Brian Wilson’s sacerdotal approach to the activity reached its peak with The Beach Boys album Surfs Up, in 1971.
Now Lorcan Finnegan, the Irish director of Vivarium, fattens the theology with a fascinating, weird, freaky drama set in an unforgiving corner of Australia.
The poetry is of a more abrasive stripe than Wilson’s soothing gibberish. This often brutal entertainment, shot in blotched light by Radek Ladczuk, kicks its protagonist to the brink of death as circling antagonists point and chuckle.
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But we are always reminded that surfing is an exalted way of wasting a man’s time. This film wouldn’t work if it were about train spotters or stamp collectors.
There are some signs of Nicolas Cage, older and more American than seems likely, being shoehorned into the title role, but such is his commitment and presence that no sane viewer will object. Indeed, the film is inconceivable without him.
This is how we now roll with the Cagester. He makes half a dozen straight-to-streaming duds and then hits the motherlode with Mandy, Pig ... or The Surfer.
Here he plays an unnamed businessman returning, after many years in the United States, to the beach where he surfed as a kid. (It was probably as well not to have Cage attempt an Aussie accent.) He takes his son and his board – a gift from his own father – down to the sea, but is immediately rebuffed by the butch locals.
“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” he is tartly informed. This doesn’t bode well for his plans to buy a house in the old neighbourhood.
What follows has the quality of fantastical nightmare. Our surfer meets an older fellow, now living in his car, who tells him that the gang, led by a charismatic thug, Scally (Julian McMahon), killed his son and his dog.
The tough guys steal our hero’s surfboard. His car is soon out of action. He cannot charge his phone and, as all his credit cards are stored there, he is unable to buy any food.
Out here in the rational world there would be ways of resolving these issues. But the Irish screenwriter Thomas Martin, who has worked on series such as Tin Star and Ripper Street, forges us an allegorical space that abuts the absurd.
He admits the influence of John Cheever’s story The Swimmer – and of the film version with Burt Lancaster – and, sure enough, there is similar interest in the pressures of masculinity.
The current film is, however, considerably more at home to the crunch and squelch of the outsider life. Scally’s gang could hardly offer a more obvious stand-in for contemporary alpha-male toxicity, the social-media bully made sunburned flesh.
The film does, perhaps, lose the run of itself in a slightly desperate final act that sees the protagonist’s resolve weakening in unsatisfactory, inconsistent directions. Some viewers may crave a little more conventional plot from a film that revels in pinballing masochistic chaos.
But The Surfer, for all its unpleasantness, offers encouraging evidence that there is still room for existential awkwardness in contemporary cinema. No better, odder man than Nicolas Cage to act that out as the catechism of surfism gains another worthy chapter.
In cinemas from Friday, May 9th
