As you may have seen in our article Black Bag and 5 other great thrillers showing at Cineworld this spring, there’s a new Nicolas Cage film coming to a big screen near you soon, and it looks awesome! Directed by Lorcan Finnigan, The Surfer (showing from 9 May) sees Cage playing a veteran wave rider who gets into a spot of bother when he returns to one of his favourite ocean resorts, resulting in what Collider described as “99 minutes of pure sun-beaten terror”. But what is it that’s going to make this one of the standout films of 2025? Read on to find out everything we know so far about The Surfer…
The director has made some great thrillers
Lorcan Finnegan had only made three feature films prior to The Surfer, and all of them were top-drawer. He kickstarted his career with the 2016 eco-horror Without Name, which scored an impressive 81% on Rotten Tomatoes. That was followed by the 2019 surreal fantasy horror Vivarium, which was described by The Guardian’s Mark Kermode as having “enough visual and thematic invention to keep viewers gripped and unsettled”. Finnegan’s third film, 2022’s psychological thriller Nocebo, also had its fair share of jumps and scares, with Bethany Lola of Loud and Clear writing that it “will have your skin crawling from start to finish”.
The plot is chilling
The storyline for The Surfer echoes every dad’s worst nightmare. Nicolas Cage plays a chilled-out American surfer dude who takes his son to an Australian beach he used to frequent as a young man. As it turns out, though, things have changed a lot since then, and the two visitors are made to feel very unwelcome by the locals. In the face of extreme intimidation, will this ageing boarder back down and leave as he’s told to, or will he stand his ground and fight back? We won’t say any more – only that The Surfer is an incredibly tense experience from start to finish.
Nicolas Cage got bitten by a snake while filming it
It’s not just the lairy locals that Cage has to deal with during the movie – there’s also a scene where he encounters a snake. Though the serpent used to film the scene wasn’t dangerous, it did get a little bitey on set. Director Lorcan Finnegan told Variety: “We have a scene with a snake, where it goes across his hand. Nic’s familiar with reptiles, so he wanted to kind of handle it himself. But it was late at night, and it wasn’t really moving very energetically. I asked the handler – who’s right behind Nic – is there anything we can do to get it to move more. She said: ‘Tickle his tail.’ So Nic tickled the tail and the thing [mimes snake attack] and it drew blood! It was non-venomous. Nic was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ And the handler says, ‘Oh yeah, if you tickle them, they can become quite aggressive and bite.’
There’s some stunning scenery in the film
Providing a modicum of respite from the movie’s nail-biting intensity are some beautiful shots of sea, sand and sky, all of which were filmed in Western Australia. “A film called The Surfer has to have amazing surf and coastline,” producer James Grandison told Screen Daily. “When the director set foot in the car park there, he said, ‘This is great’. Then, when he went down onto the beach, he said, ‘This is it.’ There are amazing rock formations. You can see half a dozen surf breaks from the car park, and when you look back towards the green hills from the beach, the houses set back in the bush make you think, ‘I want to live there.’ It all feels very natural and clean.”
Critics have loved it
The Surfer isn’t released until 9 May, but the reviews have already started to come in – and critics have been glowing in their praise. Lou Thomas of Sight and Sound described it as a “compelling addition to the Cage rage canon”. The Guardian’s Xan Brooks called it “a low-budget, hard-hitting comic bruiser of a picture: a midlife-crisis movie dressed up as a 1970s exploitation flick”, while Perry Norton of Film Threat wrote: “The film bottles beautifully the neo-noir lightning that flashes down under from time to time, with it’s thrilling presentation of a remote beach town that has gone seriously wrong.”
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