THE SURFER is one of the movies from recent years that I’ve meant to get around to because it seemed like a promising Nicolas Cage role. It’s from the Irish director Lorcan Finnegan (VIVARIUM) and writer Thomas Martin, set and filmed in Australia, and Cage plays a guy who grew up there and has returned to try to buy a house his late father used to own.

I did not notice until looking at Wikipedia for this review that Cage’s character doesn’t have a name, he’s just “The Surfer.” He seems more like a guy with a name, because he has a complicated life: investment firm job he needs to hurry up and return to, teenage son (Finn Little, THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD) he’s struggling to bond with, wife (voice of Brenda Meaney, FEAR THE NIGHT) he’s separated from and wants to get back together with but she’s with somebody else, constantly on the phone hassling his mortgage broker (Greg McNeill) and real estate agent (Rahel Romahn, FURIOSA) about how to raise the money to outbid the other potential buyer. And yeah, when he was young he travelled around the world living in a van, finding places to surf, writing for surf zines, but he gave that up a million years ago for a family and a job and everything. There is no evidence he deserves to be called “The Surfer.” But his son surfs so he wants to bring him out to this beach from his childhood and surprise him by showing him this house.

Trouble is, before they even get to the water a guy named Pitbull (surfer and Muay Thai fighter turned actor Alexander Bertrand) tells him, “Don’t live here, don’t surf here!” Locals only. While the Surfer presses the issue the leader of the Bay Boys, Scally (the late Julian McMahon, FANTASTIC FOUR 2005), comes over saying, “No need for all this fuss,” like he’s the reasonable guy who’s gonna straight this out. But with that tone he basically threatens The Surfer and says, “You gotta know when to back down.” So he does.

This The Surfer is a guy who waxes passionately while his son puts his hand on the back of his neck and shakes his head, too upset to make eye contact. Everyone close to him speaks to him with that tone of, “You know I love you, but…” When he tells his wife he’s trying to buy the house she sounds somewhere between feeling sorry for him and feeling a little disgusted. Like maybe it’s unrealistic to think he can get the house back but also it’s sad that he’s so stuck on recapturing his childhood, and maybe that’s a way of avoiding shit he really should start facing.

The Kid goes home to his mom, but The Surfer stays in his Lexus in the beach parking lot, making phone calls about the house and work. I like the gimmick that almost the entire movie is limited to a little bit of beach and this small parking lot with his car, a public restroom with a drinking fountain, and an espresso stand. That’s the most luxurious part of the location but The Barista (Adam Sollis, DANCE ACADEMY: THE MOVIE) hates him because of the time he can’t pay until he charges his phone.

At night while he’s getting water somebody knocks over his pizza and steals his surfboard, so he goes down to he Bay Boys campfire, demanding his board back, and gets quickly beat up. I give him points for fighting on a beach wearing a suit. Then he calls the police and after dawn The Cop (Justin Rosniak, ANIMAL KINGDOM) shows up, but he’s clearly friends with the Boys. He denies that they made The Surfer’s board into the “SANCTUARY” sign on the fancy beach clubhouse and tells him to “leave and stop bothering these people.”

He does not. He hangs around and watches them through binoculars. He warns a French couple that “there’s quite a bit of localism down there, it’s pretty hostile” but they look at him sadly and offer him food, which he takes offense to. It cuts right to his binocular view of them getting beat up, which is pretty funny.

The Surfer actually has a neighbor in the parking lot. There’s a guy credited as The Bum (Nic Cassim, THE MOOGAI) who lives in a trashed station wagon and says his son won the Shark Tooth (a local surf competition The Surfer says his son should enter). The Bum hates the Bay Boys, saying they killed his dog and calling them “Bunch of fuckin yuppies cosplaying at being surf gangsters.”

The parallels between the two characters are so unsubtle that I assumed they were gonna turn out to be the same person. I like the joke of how oblivious The Surfer is to their similarities and the narrowing gap between their lives. By halfway through the movie he’s dirty, bloodied, barefoot, crazed. People keep thinking he’s homeless, the cop thinks The Bum’s station wagon is his, the barista swears his dad gave him the watch he’s wearing that The Surfer swears his dad gave him, his real estate agent says he’s never met him before, it’s starting to seem like they’re not gaslighting him. The camera angles and lighting get more feverish. He watches through the slats of the fort, lit by flames inside, as they do a weird initiation ritual. Then they chase him with torches, he’s lit green and they’re lit orange.

It’s a nice looking movie, lots of yellow and green, like the colors of a blown out ‘70s photograph, but vivid. The Surfer’s memories and dreams wrapped together. Lots of magic hour. A nice scene of The Surfer in his car as the sun goes down and we see the reflection on his face slowly dimming. Lots of Leone-esque close ups of eyes, mouths and sweaty faces. Director of photography Radek Ladczuk shot THE BABADOOK and THE NIGHTINGALE but he can do warm movies too, it turns out.

I assume there’s some WAKE IN FRIGHT influence here, but it’s not too similar. I wouldn’t say it’s one of the great Cage movies, but it’s closer to that than one of the duds. A movie that benefits from his powers but was already interesting without him. There’s an enjoyably absurd twist and then another more ambiguous thing on top of that to leave things messy. I’m not sure what I think about it, but it puts you through an ordeal. Before all that, I like that this is a battle between two pretenders to the throne. Even if you look past them being colonizers (“his daddy stole the land,” according to The Bum), it’s a yuppie who moved there and a yuppie who moved away, both convinced they own the place. It’s a familiar dynamic in every major city, where born-and-raised clash with the transplants. Or it’s like any country where people look down on immigrants despite their families having moved there too, once upon a time. Legitimate arguments about etiquette and preservation of local traditions and cultures are buried under just plain old xenophobia. Any good point the Bay Boys might have is hard to notice because they’re such assholes.

There’s also something to this character “The Bum,” who has actually lived there longer than any of them but suffered, and is now stuck on paranoid delusions about Scally murdering his dog

Anyway, none of this makes The Surfer much of an underdog to root for. He does not seem like he chose the best idealistic battle to go all-in on.

The Bay Boys are inspired by a real surf gang in Palos Verdes Estates, California, who also scared away outsiders, damaged their cars, built a fort on the beach and got away with it, partly because the cops were friends with them. But then there was a huge lawsuit and the town had to pay money and enforce the rules. It sounds like The Lawyer had more success than The Surfer.