Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.In the transfixingly strange 1968 film The Swimmer, Burt Lancaster barely ever dried off; in Australian-set thriller The Surfer, Nicolas Cage struggles even to get near the water. The connection is that both films are existential dramas about supremely confident men who are gradually stripped down to their barest, most vulnerable core — and the stylistic flourishes in the new film from Irish director Lorcan Finnegan very much suggest a knowing homage to Frank Perry’s social fable.That said, The Surfer is a highly original piece that works on its own increasingly crazed terms. Cage plays an unnamed man (identified in credits only as “the Surfer”) who returns to the Australian coastal community of his childhood, where he is determined to buy a clifftop house. He also wants to introduce his teenage son to the glories of the surf there, but they run into a bunch of local males who won’t let them near the shore, snarling: “Don’t live here — don’t surf here.”Not easily cowed, the Surfer sticks around in the sun-baked beachside car park, although everything that transpires would make a sane person flee; even trying to buy a coffee becomes a station in his personal Calvary. His surfboard is stolen, his car battery dies, he loses his shoes and much else, nearly everyone he meets seems determined to make his life a misery.Thomas Martin’s script generally strikes a balance between black comedy and nightmare thriller in a Straw Dogs vein, while the Surfer’s encounters with the kingpin of the beach-Barbie blokeosphere (Julian McMahon) take on a darkly ritualistic dimension — something underscored by McMahon coming across like a smirking, red-caped mixture of Jordan Peterson and Lucifer himself.For the most part, the film maintains its own transcendentally ominous logic, but at a certain point it starts to feel as if Cage and Finnegan are egging each other on to push things in ever wilder registers. Even so, following a path from GQ-man moneyed arrogance to soul-shredded abjection, Cage is as compelling and as dramatically coherent as in any of his best recent work.Radzek Ladczuk’s ripely hued photography plus a score by François Tétaz which drips with 1960s-style quasi-Californian lushness add to the appeal of a film which can seem taut, unfocused, charming and oddly repellent in turn. But if you favour the edgy and exotic, you’ll want to catch this wave.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from May 9 and in US cinemas now
