Although Nicolas Cage’s remake of The Wicker Man was infamously terrible, that doesn’t mean that 2025’s The Surfer can’t be a much stronger take on the same themes. When director Neil LaBute’s remake of the classic British folk horror The Wicker Man was first announced, the project sounded like a match made in Heaven. LaBute’s earlier movies In The Company of Men and The Shape of Things were dark, disturbing portrays of gender relations that made romantic dramas feel like psychological horrors. If ever there was a director suited to remaking the 1973 cult movie, it was him.
However, The Wicker Man was not the chilling, satirically barbed re-imagining of the folk horror that critics expected. By the time 2006’s The Wicker Man reached its ending, any hope of the movie working as a horror had been thoroughly extinguished. Thanks to the remake’s unintentionally hilarious non-sequiturs, relentlessly self-serious tone, and surreal central turn from Nicolas Cage, The Wicker Man instantly became a “So bad, it’s good” classic on par with The Room or Troll 2. LaBute’s career never recovered, and Cage slowly started taking on more roles that tacitly acknowledged his status as a meme legend.
Nicolas Cage’s The Surfer Looks Like If The Wicker Man Was Set In Australia
The Wicker Man’s Remake Could Be Redeemed By The Surfer
While the remake never came close to doing 1973’s original The Wicker Man justice, Cage’s next movie just might manage this. Director Lorcan Finnegan’s upcoming Nicolas Cage movie The Surfer looks like an Australian remix of The Wicker Man, complete with a small-town setting, creepy locals, implied cult shenanigans, a trippy, psychedelic tone, and a blackly comedic edge. In this acclaimed thriller/ psychological horror hybrid, Cage plays a father who returns to his Australian hometown to surf with his son.
Like Finnegan’s earlier works Vivarium and Nocebo, The Surfer merges psychological horror with social commentary and black comedy.
The locals refuse to allow him on their exclusive beach, resulting in a war of wills that soon turns violent and very, very strange. Like Finnegan’s earlier works Vivarium and Nocebo, The Surfer merges psychological horror with social commentary and black comedy. The plot is a blend of 1968’s underrated drama The Swimmer and 1971’s Antipodean suspense thriller Wake in Fright, but the most obvious comparison in its star’s existing screen oeuvre is Nicolas Cage’s heavily memed The Wicker Man remake.
Nicolas Cage’s The Surfer Already Looks Far Better Than His Wicker Man Remake
Lorcan Finnegan’s Psychological Thriller Looks Genuinely Creepy
Fortunately for Finnegan, The Surfer already looks a lot stronger than The Wicker Man‘s remake. Although some retrospective reviews have argued that LaBute’s remake was in part intentionally funny, there’s no getting around the fact that 2006’s The Wicker Man is deeply ineffective as a horror movie. In contrast, The Surfer’s sense of growing dread isn’t undone by interjections of humor. Cage’s already-infamous “Eat the rat!” scene might have echoes of “Not the bees!” but Finnegan’s movie sun-burnt thriller has a sly sense of humor that makes its absurdity feel intentional.
Where 2006’s The Wicker Man took an already-iconic story and retold it in a bizarrely unscary manner, The Surfer has an entirely original, fittingly bizarre premise to work with. Finnegan’s Cage vehicle can take the star’s character to stranger, more unsettling places, particularly after his acclaimed turn in Longlegs reminded viewers that Cage can be both unexpectedly funny and truly creepy at the same time. Thus, The Surfer is likely to redeem Nicolas Cage’s infamous The Wicker Man remake almost two decades after its arrival.
