Nic Cage’s The Surfer is a spiritual successor to one of his earlier, very different (and most criminally underrated) films. The Surfer focuses on the тιтular unnamed man, whose return to the Australian beach community he grew up pits him against the toxic masculinity of a local gang of beach boys. The ambiguous approach and trippy ending of The Surfer only really work thanks to the strong filmmaking chops of the cast and crew, especially Nic Cage.
However, that shouldn’t be all that surprising. Nic Cage has been delivering idiosyncratic performances for over four decades, with The Surfer’s weirdest elements even being reflective of one of the films that cemented Nic Cage’s status as a cult icon. Here’s how The Surfer is thematically and spiritually connected to one of Nic Cage’s wildest films, and how both of them speak to the actor’s best qualities as a performer.
Nic Cage’s The Surfer Is A Lot Like His 1989 Film, Vampire’s Kiss
The Surfer And Vampire’s Kiss Have Thematic Connections, Even If They Lack Plot Similarities
The Surfer has a lot more in common with Nic Cage’s 1989 culture classic Vampire’s Kiss than one might expect at first glance, with both films exploring similar themes and relying on an inherently similar lead performance. On the surface, the two movies don’t initially appear to share anything beyond boasting Nic Cage in a lead role. Both films benefit from the versatility of Cage as an actor, as he’s able to infuse the film’s respective protagonists with a mix of pathetic, frightening, and sympathetic qualities.
Both men contend with an external source that seems to be transforming them into a new state, whether that is a bunch of Australians beating him into a helpless drifter or a night on the town transforming Cage’s Peter Loew into a vampire. Both films mine their premise for shocking pathos and gallows humor, especially as their specific descents into instability involve trying to attack people and eat raw animals like cockroaches or rats. These similarities go far beyond those surface-level qualities of the films.
The Surfer & Vampire’s Kiss Explores Perception And Power
Toxic Masculinity And Cruel Power Structures Stretch From The Beach To The Boardroom
Both The Surfer and Vampire’s Kiss are rooted in questions of sanity and authority, with each film tackling the subject matter in different ways. The filmmakers behind Vampire’s Kiss and The Surfer (Robert Bierman and Lorcan Finnegan, respectively) embrace the ambiguity of their tales, raising natural questions both in-universe and in the audience about the reality they’re witnessing. The audience is left questioning the character’s actions and sanity, especially since both movies are primarily told from a single perspective.
Both films have trippy visuals and an ambiguous hallucinatory approach to their plots that raise plenty of questions about the truth of what the characters are witnessing and experiencing. Both of these transformations extend beyond the mental and become physical too, slowly turning a successful modern man into a frightening figure. This speaks to both films’ explorations of power, particularly toxic masculinity. Both films paint Cage’s transformation into a more cruel figure as a decidedly negative one, almost costing him his humanity (and in the case of Vampire’s Kiss, ultimately his life).
Vampire’s Kiss And The Surfer Showcase Nic Cage At His Best
There’s No One In Hollywood Quite Like Nic Cage
Both of these movies are fundamentally weird, and that’s very much the intent. The visual approach and ambiguous scripts can make them hard to fully comprehend and potentially confusing on a thematic level. They’re both strong films, but potentially tricky ones for general audiences to sink their teeth into. However, both films work in large part thanks to the efforts of Nic Cage, who finds the perfect balance between unrestrained camp and emotionally resonant to make the character truly unpredictable but consistently engaging. Vampire’s Kiss was an early example of Cage’s true potential as an actor.
Nic Cage can be a traditional leading man, but it’s films like The Surfer (and the thematic predecessors to it found elsewhere in his filmography) that highlight his true capabilities as a performer.
The Surfer proves Cage still has that unique blend of internal complexity and external bombast to carry a movie. The Surfer should be infuriating, but his internal turmoil and fury over the mistreatment of the locals is genuinely heartbreaking, much in the same way his slimy and steadily more monstrous Yuppie in Vampire’s Kiss becomes steadily more pitiable even as he becomes less human. Nic Cage can be a traditional leading man, but it’s films like The Surfer (and the thematic predecessors to it found elsewhere in his filmography) that highlight his true capabilities as a performer.
