The Surfer
Lionsgate | Release Date: May 2, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
67
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 29 Critic Reviews
Positive:
20
Mixed:
9
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Film ThreatPerry NortonJan 22, 2025
The film bottles beautifully the neo-noir lightning that flashes down under from time to time, with it’s thrilling presentation of a remote beach town that has gone seriously wrong. The rest of it is often mystifying, sometimes maybe just indecisive, but it soon makes you question what you see with some pretty witty plotting. Read full review
80
EmpireJohn NugentMay 12, 2025
With a committed, crazed, brilliantly calibrated performance from late-Renaissance Cage, this is a feverishly good thriller: surreal and strange and sticky. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeMay 7, 2025
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 as the catechism of surfism gains another worthy chapter. Read full review
80
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonMay 2, 2025
The grief in this film is relatable to anyone who’s realized how hard it is to go home again, whether that means a newly gentrified neighborhood or simply the security of what a middle-class wage used to afford. Read full review
80
Film ThreatBradley GibsonMay 2, 2025
Not enough can be said about Cage’s performance. He truly has shaken off all pretense of self-consciousness and can just go “full send” on playing frustrated hysteria and sheer unabashed lunacy. He is simply unmatched and fearless in this type of role. He has elevated shrieking madness to pure art. Read full review
80
The Daily BeastNick SchagerMay 2, 2025
Cage makes a meal of it, attuning himself to director Lorcan Finnegan’s wacked-out frequency to deliver another tour-de-force of grief, regret, anguish, and seriously psychotic fury. Read full review
80
SlashfilmRafael MotamayorMar 12, 2025
When it comes to Nicolas Cage movies where he fights insurmountable odds while losing his mind, The Surfer is a great time. Read full review
80
IGNLex BriscusoMay 23, 2024
Lorcan Finnegan’s smart survival thriller The Surfer sets a brutal, sun-soaked stage for star Nicolas Cage to do what he does best: go completely nuts. Read full review
80
The Irish TimesTara BradyMay 23, 2024
The Nicolas Cage renaissance rages on and this unsettling Ozpoiltation thriller provides a perfect sandbox for “Nicolas Cage”, the actor who enjoys a good metatextual jape. Read full review
80
The TelegraphTim RobeyMay 19, 2024
Cage commits, again, to his latest malcontent on the verge, without troubling himself with an Aussie accent in any way, which is classic Cage. It’s a performance that belongs quite high up in the canon. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Xan BrooksMay 19, 2024
Crisply scripted by Thomas Martin and directed by Finnegan with a pleasing, no-frills intensity, The Surfer feels resolutely old-school. It’s a low-budget, hard-hitting comic bruiser of a picture: a midlife-crisis movie dressed up as a 1970s exploitation flick. Read full review
75
The Associated PressJake CoyleMay 1, 2025
For a long, sun-addled stretch, Lorcan Finnegan’s beach-set “The Surfer” simmers as a deliciously punishing nightmare, driving Nicolas Cage into his most natural state: a boil. Read full review
75
The A.V. ClubAndy CrumpMay 1, 2025
The Surfer slowly follows the threads of its hero’s unraveling neuroses, and Cage walks right up to the line of sanity as each strand comes undone. It is a marvelous pushback against expectations that he stays on the other side of that line. Read full review
70
Arizona RepublicBill GoodykoontzApr 28, 2025
Director Lorcan Finnegan is relentless in his pursuit of disquiet. But “The Surfer” is not just an exercise in making a hard-to-watch movie. It’s also a commentary on toxic masculinity and the absurdity of bro culture that poisons X and podcasts and other forms of media. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterLeslie FelperinMay 19, 2024
In the end, the film feels too rollicking and self-parodying to be taken seriously, but it strikes just the right tone to make it a fun Midnight movie. Read full review
67
The Film StageRory O'ConnorMay 23, 2024
This is a film that knows what it’s doing and does it very well Read full review
67
IndieWireJosh Slater-WilliamsMay 19, 2024
There is still much to enjoy and admire here if you can stay on the film’s wavelength without getting frustrated. Read full review
63
Movie NationRoger MooreMay 15, 2025
The Surfer bites off more than it can existentially chew, but it works well enough. And Cage, McMahon, Cassim and Justin Rosniak, as the stereotypical cop-who-sides-with-the-bullying-locals are terrific — by turns hatefully or ruefully so. Read full review
63
Washington PostTy BurrMay 1, 2025
The Surfer feels overthought and underwritten, a cacophony that builds to an undeserved power chord of acceptance, transcendence and retribution. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineRoss McIndoeMar 4, 2025
When The Surfer does break out of the sun-addled fugue state that marks its midsection, it delivers a gonzo finale that lets Nicolas Cage rev himself up into his most manic, meme-able self. Read full review
60
Time OutPhil de SemlyenMay 9, 2025
It’s a lurid psychological horror that’ll thrill midnight movie crowds. Read full review
60
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyMay 8, 2025
The Surfer is what you might call a slow-burn Cage. There’s the manic, hollering prize at the end (and even a line of dialogue worthy of a future meme), but also plenty of the actor’s more undervalued speciality – the expression of gargantuan helplessness, the look of a fish who’s been thrown to land and left to die Read full review
60
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiMay 2, 2025
The Surfer is a slow-burn film that requires a lot of patience. Cage does his best with limited material, as his character doesn’t have much depth beyond wanting something and aiming to get it. Read full review
60
The New York TimesGlenn KennyMay 1, 2025
If this movie leaves Cage adrift, he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable about it. Read full review
60
ColliderEmma KielyOct 9, 2024
What ultimately weighs it down is the lack of a core narrative to ground the chaos and madness around it. Still, come for the views, the insanity, and Cage giving away a priceless watch for a flat white. Read full review
60
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 19, 2024
The film is trying for something, but it’s also sketchy in the extreme. Read full review
60
Screen DailyTim GriersonMay 19, 2024
Finnegan continues to demonstrate a passion for upending the banality of the everyday, but The Surfer gets as lost as its protagonist, unable to ride the wave of its own mad design. Read full review
58
Paste MagazineChloe WalkerMar 5, 2025
Cage has never been less than immensely watchable in any movie, good or bad. In those like The Surfer, which falls somewhere in the middle, he continues to prove an unparalleled ability to transcend mediocrity, and turn any performance into a one-man firework show. Read full review
50
RogerEbert.comPeter SobczynskiMay 2, 2025
Ultimately, “The Surfer” proves to be not much more than an audience endurance test that offers up plenty of upsetting imagery and moments of emotional torment but never quite manages to make them pay off. Read full review
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