An Irish director gets the best out of Nicolas Cage

An Irish director gets the best out of Nicolas Cage

Irish director Lorcan Finnegan and Oscar winner Nicolas Cage prove to be a formidable team in the ego-under-the-Sun psychodrama The Surfer, a movie that ranks with Cage's best work of recent years.

'The Surfer' review: Nicolas Cage gets burned in Lorcan Finnegan’s psychotic beach thriller

Just in time for summer, a new movie starring Nicolas Cage reminds us that the sun is our enemy and those peace-loving surfer bros might actually be incels.

The Surfer Review – 'A feverishly good thriller'

We never learn the name of Nicolas Cage’s character in The Surfer. (He is credited simply as ‘The Surfer’.) It might, then, be tempting to think that this film — which features yet another Cage character slowly descending into madness — is simply an example of the ‘Nicolas Cage Type’, of ‘Cage Rage’, of the kind of uniquely bizarre freakout that has for years provided ample fodder for meme-merchants and YouTube compilation editors. But this is n…

The Surfer | Nic Cage's new film gave me a panic attack

In UK cinemas today, director Lorcan Finnegan’s surfer-less surf movie The Surfer is the perfect metaphor for 2025 – and not in a nice way. In the summer of 2022, UK temperatures reached an unfortunate high of 40.3°C. That July, I remember wandering the streets of south London in a daze, every patch of grass a golden-brown graveyard, watching a man vomit water into a bin as a wildfire ripped through the capital a dozen miles to the north. Faced …

Filming ‘The Surfer’: sharks, Nicolas Cage’s prop rat and the pull of nostalgia

We sat down with director Lorcan Finnegan, who offers something for both Nicolas Cage fanatics and Australian New Wave cinema enthusiasts to pore over in his new seaside psychological thriller

Interview: Lorcan Finnegan Discusses ‘The Surfer’

Lorcan Finnegan continues his trend of making intriguing films with psychological thriller The Surfer. Set in Australia, The Surfer perfectly casts Nicolas Cage as a man on the edge who is pushed to the extreme. It’s a role the actor has played countless times, but The Surfer is one of his strongest outings with Lorcan Finnegan getting a career best performance out of the star.  In The Surfer, a man (Cage) returns to the idyllic beach of his chi…