Film review: Nicolas Cage is brilliantly cast in The Surfer

Irish director Lorcan Finnegan blends the Surfer’s fever-dream into a stunningly beautiful landscape, heightening the effect of the increasingly surreal episodes

Fri, 09 May, 2025 - 13:00

Declan Burke

The Surfer

★★★★☆

A sport, a way of life, a philosophy for living: surfing lends itself to extravagant myth-making, which The Surfer (15A) is happy to lean into as the movie opens, with our eponymous hero (played by Nicolas Cage) informing his estranged son (Finn Little) that life’s crucial moments are a lot like encountering a massive wave: ‘You either surf it,’ he says, ‘or you get wiped out.’

But when the Surfer returns home to surf the remote beach at Luna Bay, he discovers that the shore has been colonised by the Bay Boys, led by the guru-like Scally (Julian McMahon), and that a culture of ‘localism’, which refuses entry to non-natives, is tacitly encouraged. Outraged at being denied the right to surf, the Surfer refuses to leave, setting him on a collision course with Scally and his thugs.

Nicolas Cage is brilliantly cast here, playing an ostensible tough nut who privately mythologises a gilded past in which surfing equalled freedom and endless possibility; now, separated from his wife, and desperate to put his old life back together, the Surfer is trying to reinsert himself into the exclusive world of Luna Bay by buying his childhood home.

But our hero, we fear, is doomed before the story even begins: a dreamer given to exotic fantasies of the perfect life, he is prone to delusion even before dehydration, heatstroke and the Bay Boys’ escalating aggressions cause his grip on reality to loosen.

Irish director Lorcan Finnegan ( Vivarium) blends the Surfer’s fever-dream into a stunningly beautiful landscape, heightening the effect of the increasingly surreal episodes as the disorientated Surfer plunges deeper into paranoia; meanwhile, the cultivated Scally, who likens his followers to Shaolin monks, is gradually revealed to be an erudite exemplar of toxic masculinity. A vivid account of a fragile man’s attempt to regain his paradise lost, The Surfer is a powerfully poetic drama.

theatrical release

Ocean with David Attenborough

★★★★☆

Ocean with David Attenborough (G) sets out to explore ‘the last great wilderness of open ocean,’ a realm, Attenborough tells us at the outset, that is ‘almost entirely a mystery.’ Who better to guide us through the murky depths than Attenborough himself, who, at 98 years young, is one of the planet’s greatest living treasures.

He may be considerably frailer now than he appeared in his very first outing (the film employs old footage of the young naturalist frolicking in the sea), but his passion for the natural world remains undimmed. Almost inevitably, Attenborough isn’t simply revealing the ocean’s hidden wonders; this film also serves as a warning about climate change, and about the existential crisis being caused by the industrialised fishing of an increasingly scarce resource; but it also sounds a hopeful note, demonstrating how quickly the ocean can bounce back if afforded the opportunity.

If Ocean does prove to be, as Attenborough suggests, his final film, it is a fitting testament to his life’s work.

theatrical release

The Wedding Banquet

★★★☆☆

Set in Seattle’s Asian-American LGTBQ community, The Wedding Banquet (15A) is a droll farce about doing whatever it takes to survive.

Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone) are trying to conceive; their best friends Chris (Bowen Yang) and Min (Han Gi-Chan) are desperate to prevent Min being dragged back to Korea by his wealthy, conservative family. And so Min proposes – literally – that he should marry Angela, with her ‘dowry’ being the cost of the latest round of Lee’s fertility treatment.

Andrew Ahn’s film revels in subverting expectations – Angela’s ‘Tiger Mom’ May (Joan Chen), for example, is outraged that her darling lesbian daughter would even consider marrying a man – and the script is littered with dry one-liners (‘Queer theory takes all the joy out of being gay.’).

For a film that satirises conservative attitudes, however, The Wedding Banquet is itself excessively polite and restrained; it’s fun, but it might have benefited from a little more irreverence.