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 \u2014 and the stylistic flourishes in the new film from Irish director Lorcan Finnegan very much suggest a knowing homage to Frank Perry\u2019s 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 \u201cthe Surfer\u201d) 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\u2019t let them near the shore, snarling: \u201cDon\u2019t live here \u2014 don\u2019t surf here.\u201dNot 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\u2019s script generally strikes a balance between black comedy and nightmare thriller in a Straw Dogs vein, while the Surfer\u2019s encounters with the kingpin of the beach-Barbie blokeosphere (Julian McMahon) take on a darkly ritualistic dimension \u2014 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\u2019s ripely hued photography plus a score by Fran\u00e7ois T\u00e9taz 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\u2019ll want to catch this wave.\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606In UK cinemas from May 9 and in US cinemas now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":306137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-306136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306136"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306136\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":306138,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306136\/revisions\/306138"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/306137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}