Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer is a sun-scorched psychological trip masquerading as a B-movie beach thriller. Brutal and hypnotic, the film traps its protagonist - and its audience - in a dreamlike purgatory of sweat, sand and simmering male rage. With lurid colours, looping structure, and deliberately disorienting atmosphere, The Surfer channels the existential entrapment of Luis Buñuel and the surreal logic of Finnegan’s own Vivarium. But where Vivarium boxed its characters inside suburbia, here the trap is wide open: a beach that might as well be hell.

Cage plays the titular Surfer, a nameless, middle-aged man who claims to have roots in the area, yet is treated like a trespasser the moment he sets foot on the golden sands of Lunar Bay. Bullied by a cabal of locals led by Julian McMahon’s smirking Scally (parts beach bro and corporate sociopath who smiles like a shark – all teeth, no warmth), the Surfer is repeatedly humiliated, gaslit, and physically assaulted.

But he stays. Because beneath the farce and cruelty is something quietly desperate: a man clinging to a dream he can’t let go of.

Nostalgia is the true villain here. The Surfer isn’t just longing for a return to place, but to a time when his family was still intact. His fixation on reclaiming his childhood home is a symbol of that delusion. He believes that if he could buy the house and ride the waves again, everything will fall back into place. But these obsessions with the house, beach and his own romanticised past are what drove his wife and son away. His relentless pursuit of success, ownership and legacy, has left him alone and untethered. The tragedy is not that the Surfer has lost those close to him, but that he continues to chase an idealised version of their relationship, instead of accepting what it’s become - and showing up for them as he is, not as he was.

What makes The Surfer stick isn’t its visceral tone or Cage’s red-faced performance (though both are noteworthy). It’s the feeling that you’re watching someone be erased, inch by inch. There’s a looped sense of stasis - like Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel - where time stretches and bends but nothing truly changes, except perhaps the level of psychological damage. Time warps. Days blur. Dehydration and exhaustion distort reality. The protagonist is haunted - by a mysterious older man, by glimpses of a lost son, and by visions that flicker and vanish before we can get a grip on them. What follows is a sunburnt descent into madness. Cage’s character loses everything - his dignity, his car, even access to clean water. He lingers around the beach like a ghost of his own past, baking in his own desperation.

Visually, The Surfer is rich with texture and menace. Finnegan and cinematographer Radzek Ladczuk render the Australian coastline as eerily hostile. Heatwaves ripple through every frame; colours are oversaturated, borders blur, daylight is punishing. The air feels thick with menace.

Cage is, unsurprisingly, electric. He pitches the performance somewhere between tragic and deranged, veering from wide-eyed optimism to pathetic rage, often within the same scene. As ever, he finds the operatic in the absurd. He’s both delusional and heartbreakingly sincere. He wants his home, his wave, his version of the past - but the film quietly questions whether any of that ever really existed.

The idea of poisonous nostalgia also permeates through the toxic, anti-outsider bravado of Scally’s surf gang. Their obsession with violence and purity, expressed via threats, intimidation, rituals and faux-philosophies, is both cartoonish and credible in its ‘Make This Beach Great Again' vibes, and McMahon plays Scally with a charming menace that holds the film together. The fact that the gang are so irredeemable and violent, yet still don’t puncture the Surfer’s idealised image of the beach, shows how myopic he has become, as well as the weakness of those who choose to align with oppressive forces to feel comfortable.

If The Surfer falls short, it’s in its hesitance to fully explore the emotional depth of its central character. Though the film hints at themes of grief, legacy, and the crushing weight of unfulfilled dreams, it often prioritises tension and confrontation over delving into these complexities. Yet, this very ambiguity reflects the Surfer’s internal struggle – torn between the person he was, the person he believes himself to be, and how the world perceives him.

Finnegan crafts a lean, eerie, darkly funny film that lingers long after it ends. If Vivarium boxed us in, The Surfer lets us wander - sun-struck and sand-blasted - until we realise we’ve been trapped all along.

• In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below: