Tag: nicolas-cage

The Surfer (2024)

  • Director: Lorcan Finnegan
  • Screenplay: Thomas Martin
  • Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon
  • Cinematography: Radek Ładczuk
  • Editing: Tony Cranstoun
  • Score: François Tétaz
  • Genre: Psychological thriller
  • Runtime: 100 minutes

Nicolas Cage is ‘The Surfer’; from Australia, raised in the States but returned to the place of his upbringing so he can buy his childhood home. It’s on the side of a cliff, overlooking the beach he spent his youth catching waves. A house with that view doesn’t come cheap so the Surfer, intending to move his wife and son there, desperately tries to get in touch with his broker in order to procure enough funds to close the deal in time for Christmas.

He runs afoul of a hostile gang of surf-loving thugs who proclaim: ‘don’t live here, don’t surf here’ to non-locals. Not the most welcoming blokes.

In the constant shadow of the bullies, the Surfer spends the next few days practically living in the nearby car park, waiting in vain for the call from the broker. He gradually loses his personal possessions one by one; his shoes, watch, phone and his wedding ring are exchanged for various items. Material belongings are replaceable but with each item lost, a layer of his sanity is stripped away. He’s reduced to scrabbling in bins for a meal and there’s a moment where he bites a rat to sate his hunger. He is a broken man; desperation personified.

It’s the middle of an Australian summer, the sun beating down on beach-goers. The film is like a heat-induced dizzy spell; magnificently hallucinatory camerawork, zooming into the Surfer’s face, the clifftop house pictured in shimmering light as if it’s a mirage. The sublime cinematography really captures the sun-dappled locale, the sky an almost unworldly azure. Cage gives his usual over-the-top performance yet it actually works in his favour; it plays into the heightened sense of reality.

My rating: 9 / 10

Longlegs (2024)

  • Director: Osgood Perkins
  • Screenplay: Osgood Perkins
  • Cast: Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Kiernan Shipka
  • Cinematographer: Andres Arochi
  • Editing: Greg Ng, Graham Fortin
  • Score: Zilgi
  • Genre: Horror thriller
  • Runtime: 101 minutes

Much like 90s classic ‘The Silence of the Lambs‘ has a young, female FBI agent face to face against a notorious serial killer, ‘Longlegs‘ has Lee Harker (Monroe) hunting Longlegs, a deranged Satanist bogeyman (Cage). But instead of skin suits and fava beans, we’ve got creepy dolls and sinister religious elements as the components.

Lee Harker has a ‘gift’ – she’s supposedly ‘half psychic’ but this is only mentioned in the opening 15 minutes and promptly forgotten about for the rest of the movie. And, similar to all characters who are in any way ‘different’, she’s largely devoid of emotion (and personality) with Monroe turning her head mechanically as if she’s an empty-headed automaton.

Nicolas Cage is prosthetic-ed up to the nines (straggly grey hair, bulbous nose, rubbery chin) – if it wasn’t for his voice I wouldn’t have been able to tell it was him. Pity the efforts of the makeup department are wasted as he gives his usual over-the-top performance. Usually a bit of craziness works well when playing a psychotic character but Cage is way too hammy to take seriously.

‘Longlegs‘ has a kind of experiment feel to it, with lingering visuals of bubbling liquids and snakes randomly thrown in, probably to give it a unique or unsettling quality – perhaps because the director knows the film is hardly original and has little bite to it. You’ve got to question why it was made – maybe Nicolas Cage (listed as a producer) wanted to play some sort of psycho for the fun of it.

I appreciate the ’90s-core’ feeling; grainy camera lenses, wintry woodlands and log cabins but it just comes off as an ‘X-Files‘ episode minus the aliens or again, ‘The Silence of the Lambs‘.

That said, I think it’s the first movie I’ve seen in which the end credits scroll up rather than down but it’s too late for that gimmick to save the film.

My rating: 4 / 10