‘The Surfer’ is an hallucinatory, almost dreamlike, psychological drama along the lines of Nicolas Roeg’s ‘Walkabout’ or even ‘The Wicker Man’, in which an outsider enters a community which at first appears tranquil and ideal, only to find that it has ruptures at its very heart when the local community act in a manner that is hostile and menacing. The Kurt Russell thriller ‘Breakdown’ also addressed the same tropes involving an innocent outsider entering an environment which gradually reveals itself to be injurious to their wellbeing, and in which they are gaslighted by the locals, who disclaim any knowledge of the damage that is being inflicted.

The entirety of ‘The Surfer’ is shot outdoors, apart from occasional scenes in a toilet in the parking lot, with Cage refusing to leave the immediate area of the beach where he simply wishes to surf, but in which the local menfolk make it clear that he is not welcome as ‘If you don’t live here you can’t surf here’. Surfing and suffering are shown to be inextricably connected, with Cage’s character treated here as a sacrificial figure who has to undergo physical and psychological torture if he wishes to achieve his ambition.

The suffering with which he is inflicted is his via dolorosa, in which he has to endure unrelenting pain before the possibility of redemption is afforded him. The film plays on these theological threads, even to the point of having Cage’s unnamed protagonist being stripped of his material possessions – his car, his expensive watch, his clothes, his mobile phone and his surfboard – as the precursor to the attainment of a ‘Point Break’-style lesson in reaching the apotheosis of his dream of surfing once again on the beach that is familiar to him from his youth.

The mismatch between Cage’s nostalgia for a past that, as we see in flashbacks, may not have been so innocent after all, is at the heart of ‘The Surfer’, where the interplay of dreams for the recapturing of a prelapsarian past and the reality of a present reality defined by toxic masculinity and the physical and emotional inability of ‘living the dream’, is so starkly portrayed. The film does though lapse into the kind of awkward, embarrassing flourishes familiar from Cage’s own involvement with the 2006 remake of ‘The Wicker Man’, here with Cage trying to turn the tables on the locals who persistently outsmart and outflank him by beseeching them to ‘eat the rat’.

We see everything from his point of view, and as he loses his grip on his sanity so we also start to question whether he really did have the car, the watch, the surfboard and other material accoutrements in the first place or whether he is a fractured, psychologically damaged figure in the first place who has lost his wife and son and who turns to his childhood past as a means of escaping the vicissitudes of a present with which he is unable to cope. His refusal to leave the beach, even when the more he stays the harder it is for him to reach his goals, turns out to work to his advantage.

In ‘The Passion of the Christ’, Jim Caviezel’s Jesus undergoes two hours of unrelenting suffering and punishment before his moment of apotheosis. ‘The Surfer’ appears to be channelling these same dynamics of showing how real redemption comes at a price and has to be earned rather than for it to be paid mere lip service. It may, though, take a few days after watching this surreal and hypnotic movie before all of these threads start to make sense in a film which goes to great lengths to ensure that we, the audience, are given no signposts as to how the torture that is inflicted on us as much as it is on Cage may possibly be resolved.