The Surfer 4K 2024 Ultra HD 2160p

Story Movie

After living in the US for several years, a man returns to his hometown on the Australian coast, where he plans to buy a house that once belonged to his family. Together with his teenage son, he goes surfing, but encounters resistance from a gang of surfers who believe that this beach is for locals only. The man refuses to give up and engages in a violent confrontation with them.

Review 4K Movie

There is no better gift to start the summer than watching a movie set on the beach. Surfer is an intriguing yet light-hearted film that raises heavy issues from the bottom of the ocean and splashes them on your head with sand. A hot idyll—a house on the beach, a Lexus, a family, and the native shore where you ran as a boy. It's almost within reach, but suddenly everything falls into the abyss.

Surfer has several interwoven levels. The first is plot-driven and unpretentious. The main character wants to buy a house in his native village, but local gangsters and sectarians are against outsiders. They harass him the whole way, but he resists and insists on his own way, dreaming of living by the sea and going out on his board to the waves, but along the way he gets into various troubles.

I would call the second layer surreal absurdity, with deliberately bright colors, blurred horizons, and convex lenses with ultra-wide images trying to deceive us—where is reality, and where is the dream? Is it a dream? Or does our hero find himself in something like limbo, where he is forced to suffer eternally and remember the terrible moments of the past, trying to escape from the trap of his fears? We feel unbearable pain for the failed surfer, but we continue to try to figure out what we need to do next. Go through an initiation ceremony, be reborn, accept ourselves and our circumstances, make a sacrifice. The deepest level of this film is existential drama and futility, disappointment in one's ideals. What will we see in the finale—a mystery? Is it the past, present, or future of the father and son? The narrative dynamics are pessimistic but very mythological.

In terms of directing, Surfer does not surprise with its mastery. It is a pleasant, uncomplicated spectacle, somewhat ironically flirting with B-grade summer comedies. Nicolas Cage is the perfect casting choice, he simplifies the overall mood and prevents the film from turning into an overly edifying fable. Julian McMahon is familiar with demonic entities from his days in Charmed, and he is excellent in this role. The script lacks more sharp edges and perhaps more detailed dialogue. The actors' emotions, fights, and other wonderful scenes create a dark yet bright, magical atmosphere of hopeless, hysterical shock. The moral may be slightly banal—life is a fairy tale, sometimes a comic book, sometimes a thriller, sometimes an ancient tragedy, or a Kafkaesque parable. It can take five minutes to go from a homeless vagrant to a successful manager, and no one will give you answers as to why it happened that way and to you specifically.