The Surfer

...although there should be a moral in [the plot] somewhere, the result is so risible and Cage’s performance so ridiculous that all you can do is laugh.

Cosmic philosophizing turns into something kind of like Iron John toxic masculinity with a little Dostoevsky's The Devils... Freakingly bonkers.

The film is full of recycled commentary on the dangers of hypermasculinity, but it doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not—just ride the wave, and you’ll have a good time.

The Surfer, for all its unpleasantness, offers encouraging evidence that there is still room for existential awkwardness in contemporary cinema. No better, odder man than Nicolas Cage to act that out

[The Surfer] simply relinquishes control to Cage. That’s fine. It’s always a pleasure to see him lose it.

With a committed, crazed, brilliantly calibrated performance from late-Renaissance Cage, this is a feverishly good thriller: surreal and strange and sticky.

A descent into madness, with another fully embodied turn from the fearless Cage, The Surfer is a specific type of character-based thriller that enjoys its exasperating temperament.

...The Surfer is, above all, a psychological thriller where reality and nightmare blur. [Full review in Spanish]

Overall, The Surfer is a fantastic throwback to a very 1970s style of psychological thriller that the likes of Nicholas Roeg or Sam Peckinpah would have made.

[Brings] to mind the nightmarish acid trips of great Ozploitation classics... and while those are richer texts to be sure, they are instructive as to the simmering, supernatural-feeling, and spooky texture viewers will ultimately find in The Surfer.