You can call him The Surfer.
All he wants to do is splash into Luna Bay and let the sun and the sparkling teal-blue waves transport him back to the days when a surfer was all he was. And he wants to share those joys with his son.
You see, The Surfer used to haunt this sunny Australian shore daily. His dad owned the house on the hill overlooking this beach. In fact, you can see that house in all its glory when you paddle out and turn back to catch your first wave.
And that’s the second reason The Surfer has pressed his son to go out surfing with him. He’s buying that house. Ever since the separation between The Surfer and his wife took place, the boy has been distant. Their relationship has floundered. Moving back here with this beach nearby will surely make things right again.
Dressed in his new wet suit, with his board under his arm, The Surfer sets forth with a smile. This will be a time for memories, a day of renewal and lessons. “You can’t stop a wave,” he tells his son with metaphorical intention. “It’s pure energy. You either surf it, or it wipes you out!”
Problem is, The Surfer’s meaningful axiom doesn’t apply to other surfers. Those you can stop. And that’s exactly what one oversized musclehead of a guy does when The Surfer and his boy reach the sand.
The big dude, named Pitbull, growls in their direction and declares “Don’t live here. Can’t surf here!” And no matter what explanations or conciliatory bones The Surfer tosses this guy’s way, Pitbull simply stands his ground and snarls.
After several minutes of this, the boy is ready to back down. Pitbull definitely looks to be living up to his name. And he’s got at least 30 fewer years and 30 extra pounds of brawn on The Surfer.
As the discussion draws out and other angry eyes turn their way, it turns out that everyone else on the beach is equally aggressive and territorial. They’re the Bay Boys. They’re locals. And no one surfs here but them.
The apparent leader, Scally, tries to cool the rising heat of the moment. But even he makes it clear that The Surfer should go back, stow his gear and leave. “Who knows what those guys might do,” he notes. “Your boy might end up hurt.”
That makes The Surfer step back and head to the parking lot. His son rides his bike home.
Unfortunately, The Surfer stays. He’s worked his whole life to get back here. He’s sacrificed. He’s not about to back off now. He’s lost so much already.
What the former surfer doesn’t realize, however, is that he has so, so much more to lose.
The Surfer has apparently let his work dominate his life to the point that’s it’s harmed his most important relationships. But he declares that he wants all that to change.
He wants to spend time with his son; share memories and look to the future. And even though his wife has moved on to another relationship, he hopes to shore up things with her, too.
And squinting into the sunlight off the waves, you could also say that Scally wants to mentor the young members of the Bay Boys and help them become better men. (That said, his intentions are definitely twisted in sometimes destructive and harmful ways, as we’ll see.)
Scally takes on a shaman-like role in the Bay Boys’ culture and speaks to them about the spiritual and social significance of their tribal connection as men. “You can’t surf if you don’t suffer,” he declares. His speeches suggest that, as with surfing and life, a man must endure pain and lose everything before he can appreciate all he has.
[Spoiler Warning] In that light, The Surfer has everything taken from him—his money, his phone, his car, his shoes, his dignity—until he is beaten down to a bloody, nearly insane base state. At that point he’s given a cocktail of drugs and “reborn” as a new member of the Bay Boys in a baptism-like ceremony.
The Surfer’s bloody and near-sunstroke-inducing misery also takes place over a Christmas holiday, which winks at a suffering and rebirth theme.
We see shirtless men on the beach and in the water. And the Bay Boys welcome female family members to their beach shack headquarters, dressed in typical shorts and tank-top beachwear and swimsuits.
It’s implied that the married Scally also uses the beach shack as a place for occasional extramarital trysts. We see him usher a stoned teen girl in and pull the entrance curtain closed behind him.
The Surfer is told about a young guy stealing Scally’s girlfriend’s affection at some point in the past. And people suggest that Scally had the guy killed, though he denies it.
The Surfer’s wife calls him and asks that he sign their divorce papers so that she can remarry. She also lets him know that she is pregnant with the other man’s child.
This is a film packed with violence. In fact, we watch The Surfer being physically and emotionally tormented (if not tortured) through about three quarters of the movie.
He’s shoved, beaten and bloodied. His shoes are stolen, and he steps on broken glass in the parking lot. He’s bitten by a dog, and several people throw rocks at him. Men chase him with torches and a broken bottle. Thugs drop a live rat near The Surfer. It bites him as he grabs it and then bashes the creature’s brains out on the side of a vehicle.
The Surfer is also left to starve, after his phone is taken and he has no means to contact anyone outside of the beach area. The blazing sun beats down and we see The Surfer slowly succumbing to something like insanity. A police officer who shows up treats him as a vagrant and warns him not to bother people.
Someone states that the Bay Boys killed his son and his dog. One of the Bay Boys confirms that it’s so. A visiting couple from France tries to surf on the beach and gets badly beaten by the aggressive Bay Boys. They drive away bruised and bloody.
A woman looks on as the men beat someone and comments that, at the very least, it’s good for the Bay Boys to “blow off some steam here.” That way, they don’t “go home and beat their wives.”
A man is pummeled fiercely with a signpost. His nose is badly broken and his face covered in blood. He’s then held under water as he struggles for air. Then his attacker jams a dead rat in his mouth.
Men pour gasoline into a man’s car and the Surfer is prodded into setting it aflame. The Surfer finds a gun with several bullets in it, but he can’t bring himself to shoot anyone. However, someone else finds the gun and forces people to kneel on the beach. He shoots a man in the temple and then commits suicide with a blast to his own head.
We find out that The Surfer’s father committed suicide on this same beach.
The dialogue contains more than 40 f-words and a half-dozen s-words along with exclamations of “h—,” “a–hole,” “b–ch,” “d–n” and a single use of the c-word. Someone uses an offensive hand gesture.
The Bay Boys—ranging in age from early teens and up—drink heavily on the beach at night. They toss back cans of beer and pass around bottles of booze. The Surfer and the Bay Boys also smoke weed. (One teen girl appears to be quite high.)
Someone injects The Surfer with a “recovery cocktail” of drugs that send him into a blurred haze for a long time. (In fact, it’s unclear if the things he’s seeing and hearing are real or not.)
We see several people smoking cigarettes. The Surfer sleeps in a bush next to a discarded hash pipe.
People take everything from The Surfer, they take his clothes, his cash and his phone, and they steal his car. They throw his food on the ground, and he’s left digging in the trash cans for any rancid thing to eat. He sucks the contents out of found birds eggs. The desperate Surfer is forced to trade his expensive watch for a cup of coffee that someone then spills on his shirt front. He’s tempted to eat a dead rat until he notices people watching him with disdain.
After all that, The Surfer has very little to sustain himself but water through a nearby public water fountain. But someone splatters the water tap with a bag full of dog waste. (The camera eyes that fly-covered mess repeatedly as The Surfer is forced to drink filthy water and suck moisture from a small puddle in the parking lot.)
Many different people lie about The Surfer’s situation. They treat him like a local bum, taunting him, laughing at him, spitting on him and throwing trash in his direction. The Surfer vomits after consuming something foul.
When you watch the trailer for The Surfer you get the impression that it’s something of a revenge pic: A guy wants to take his son surfing, is rebuffed and beaten by local thugs and comes roaring back to claim his wave.
That, however, isn’t exactly what you get.
This is more of an absurdist tragedy that speaks metaphorically about life; in particular, male life. It’s a play of sorts that’s drawn out like a bad toothache and filled with blazing heat, broken glass, sandy abuse and dog waste.
The story is about a man trying to hold on to his idyllic memory of the past who falls into a five-day purgatory of loss and pain. And it’s all wrapped in some kind of “male rite” shamanism that ends with a drug-fueled quasi-baptism and human sacrifice.
Surfing? Well, there’s not much of that. Surfing is simply used as an attack-the-wave-or-wipe-out metaphor for life’s struggle.
And, yes, the film is every bit as strange and painful as my description makes it sound. Even a meme-worthy rant from Nicolas Cage can’t redeem the profane bloody beatings, humiliations and sun scorched insanity that viewers must sit through.
The film’s central antagonist, Scally, proclaims several times to his gathered Bay Boys that you “can’t surf if you don’t suffer!”
If the reverse of that is true as well, then viewers who sit through this film should be great on a board.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
