If I had written The Surfer…

I grew up all over, and few of the places I lived were worth calling home. There was the hyper-conservative town where I was told I was going to hell for my pixie cut (because that made me a lesbian, obviously, and lesbians went to hell 🙄), the hyper-consumerist town where I became infamous as a commie sympathiser, the miserable town that only left me with memories of watching roadkill slowly rot against a backdrop of corn over a period of months...

I am not unfamiliar with the horror that can accompany the word "home", and as I started watching The Surfer, I was sure that was the theme it was going to explore. I was so excited to finally have a film that recognised the emotion of coming from that kind of place, that laid it bare for other people to see... But The Surfer was not that. It wasn't bad - building tension with the sweltering heat of the Outback was an inspired choice - but it wasn't that.

So today, I’m not here to talk about The Surfer, at least not as it was. Instead, I’m here to talk about my version of The Surfer, because if Lorcan Finnegan failed to deliver on my artistic vision, then I’m left with no choice but to make the effort myself.

Reinterpretation

This is going to be a two-step process, because while the film didn't end how I hoped it would, there was enough along the way that already works for my vision... If you squint a little.

And so, we begin with the reinterpretation.

The Surfer starts with Nic Cage as the Surfer taking his son to the beach where he grew up - only to be driven off of it immediately by the locals. See, while the Surfer was born there, that doesn't count for mucho. He doesn’t live there now, and he doesn’t act or sound like any of the locals either given that his family moved to the US after his father died (or killed himself…?).

Even if Finnegan didn't realise it, the seeds of horror being set : the Surfer is “home”, but home isn’t as he remembers it.

We soon come to learn just why the Surfer is so desperate, why he clings to the idea of buying his grandfather's old house and returning to the beach where he grew up : he’s on the brink of losing his job, his son doesn’t seem to have much respect for him, and his wife left him and is having a child with someone else.

The call of home is the kind of lullaby you'd hear in a horror movie. It promises that if you return to the last place that life was good and simple, it will somehow be good and simple again. You'd be a fool to listen.

The Surfer doesn't see the way his nostalgia is seducing him into a trap, though, and over the next few days of hell, he's bullied, shunned, and ultimately loses everything : his father’s surfboard, then his father’s watch, and finally even his mind and sense of self. It’s a gripping watch, and beautifully acted… But there could be another layer of anxiety as we watch the Surfer's life crumble around him.

Each item the Surfer loses is far more than just an object - they're his happy memories, memories that are collapsing as he learns the truth of the place he calls home. But he's already lost so much. That's why he's back. Those memories were the last shaky foundation that kept the Surfer standing.

Once they're lost, so are his hopes, his dreams... His last remaining sense of self.

The Surfer doesn’t belong anymore, if he ever did in the first place. But that just leads him to a new question: now that he’s seen the truth of his hometown, does he face the reality and leave or choose ignorance and stay?

Well, if we look to the film, there's a moment that could already act as an answer to this. After being tortured and gaslit into believing he was homeless, he's presented with proof of who he was - who he is. Finally he knows that his life was more than just a hallucination, that he has a car and a job and a family... But what does he do with that information? He chooses to cry about his grandfather's house that's just out of reach.

Even as reality returns to him, the Surfer rejects a deeper reality. He can't let go of the home he once knew - he can't even accept that he never knew it. There are other beaches, other towns, other places to find peace and rebuild, and yet he embraces his home, as if ignoring its toxicity might save him.

It's a delusion that will be his downfall.

Reinvention

Now we arrive at our second step, because there's very little of the remaining story that still works with my vision. The last scenes that would remain unchanged are simply needed to push the plot forward : the Surfer flies into a rage, confronting the locals, where he learns that his torture was merely a test - one that he passed. He proved that he is one of them, violent and rageful, and now, they'll help him get everything he wants. All that remains is for him to be branded by them and undergo a drug-fuelled initiation rite.

And so, my reinvention begins.

The first change would actually take place throughout the film : the Surfer, trapped in the beach parking lot for days, would become increasingly sunburned as the film goes on. Part of this is definitely a joke, since we don’t see the Surfer use sunscreen once in the entirety of The Surfer. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Aussie TV, it’s that they take sunscreen really seriously (and with good reason). More importantly, though, I would frame it in a way that other meanings were able to creep in - the idea of the Surfer’s shame at where he came from, or perhaps a symbol of rising pressure as his nostalgia comes into conflict with his reality.

Between that sunburn and everything else that happened to him (stepping on glass, dehydration, eating rotten food out of the trash… I don’t think I need to go on), the drugs and branding would finally push the Surfer over the edge. Not into a rage this time, but rather into catatonic illness.

The Surfer would collapse, only to wake up in a hospital - the one he was born in. As far as origins go, this is the the furthest back he can get. And sure, from what I’ve read, Australian hospitals are pretty decent, but there's always something. Maybe he sees a leaky faucet, or a glove that didn’t quite make it into the trash can. It doesn't matter how small it is - it’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

His home is not as good as he thought it was. He is not as good as he thought he was, because in his mind, his home is the only thing he had left.

And so, like his father, he goes to the beach, and he kills himself to escape the painful reality.

It's a miserable ending, I know. An endless cycle of longing, desperation, and pain... But there would be a glimmer of hope at the very end. Just as the Surfer found his father, his son would find him. But instead of the pattern repeating, the Bum, another character we meet in the film who had lost his son, would come and embrace him -

Home isn’t a place. It’s people, those who love and care for us. The Surfer didn’t realise that, but perhaps the Kid still has a chance.

In the final shot, we would see a wave breaking over the Surfer’s body while the Bum and the Kid wait for the police. We would remember the initial monologue about a wave, born in the middle of the ocean, travelling for who knows how long, only to break against a shore in a quick moment of violence… And we would watch the wave pull away, sinkning back into the sea. Even after that brief violence, the wave would recede back to where it came from, waiting to be born again.

Perhaps now the Surfer is finally home.

Some people might think a film is a failure when it doesn't quite achieve the emotional impact they expected of it, but they're wrong. For all that The Surfer failed to live up to my hopes, it still gave me a baseline, a problem to solve, and in doing so, it became my inspiration. Would I write my version of the story in its entirety? No. I don’t know enough about Australia or surfing culture to even begin. But I could take my ideas and make something new, something that meant so much more to me, and for that, I'm grateful.

Perhaps you didn't like my version of the story. If so, I can only hope that it's good enough to inspire you to change it yourself. If art isn't loved, the next best thing it can be is inspiring.

Thanks for reading ☺️