Film reviews: The Surfer | Ocean with David Attenborough | The Uninvited | Desire: The Carl Craig Story

Lorcan Finnegan’s puzzle box movie The Surfer brings out the best in Nicolas Cage, writes Alistair Harkness

The Surfer (15) ★★★★

Ocean with David Attenborough (PG) ★★★★

The Uninvited (15) ★★★★

Desire: The Carl Craig Story (15) ★★★

If surfing is a state of mind — to paraphrase Patrick Swayze’s guru-like surfer in action classic Point Break — then Nicholas Cage’s new film The Surfer explores what might happen if said mind is thoroughly unhinged. Dispensing with his own Zen-like surfing-as-a-metaphor-for-life speech in the opening minutes, Cage’s titular character — we never learn his real name — soon finds himself battered not by the waves, but by land-bound forces he can’t control as his efforts to buy his former childhood home overlooking a primo Australian surfing beach run headfirst into his own precarious financial situation and a cult-like group of psycho locals intent on making Cage’s outsider suffer when he nonchalantly tries to surf their break with his teenage son.

Nicolas Cage in The Surfer | Contributed

At first the hostility seems like a bit of macho posturing on both sides. But it soon takes on more sinister intent as Cage’s reality appears to fracture and he spirals into vagrancy and violence, trapped like the very rat he at one point tries to force on his tormentors, whose own real-life jobs add additional levels of satire to this increasingly surreal psychological horror freak-out when they’re revealed late on.

Like director Lorcan Finnegan’s 2019 film Vivarium, The Surfer turns out to be something of a puzzle box movie, one fuelled — like Vivarium — by the stresses of buying property, but which also cannily riffs on the 1971 Australian New Wave classic Wake in Fright to explore a crisis in masculinity in a rapidly changing world.

The material certainly brings out the best in Cage, whose acting pyrotechnics are put to disturbing use dismantling his middle-aged character’s outwardly successful life piece by piece.

Ocean With David Attenborough | © Silverback Films and Open Planet Studios

Ocean with David Attenborough finds the 99-year-old force of nature squaring up for a fight in an epic documentary that simultaneously extols the wonders of the ocean and underscores the urgent action required to protect it. At the heart of the film is his conviction that the oceans of the world hold the key to alleviating the climate crisis, with scientific evidence pointing to the crucial role marine life plays in capturing carbon and producing oxygen, and coastal regions thriving when sustainable fishing is enforced.

The problem is the industrial levels of destruction happening every day thanks to trawlers dredging up the ocean floors and destroying delicate ecosystems as part of the global fishing industry’s ongoing efforts to maximise its catches amid ever dwindling levels of fish and shellfish.

Footage — presumably covert — of the damage being wrought is properly enraging, but Attenborough is no pessimist. His ability to lay out a clear-headed strategy for recovery by pointing to past environmental actions that have successfully demonstrated humanity’s capacity to move away from destructive behaviour, not to mention all the scientific evidence regarding the ocean’s own regenerative properties when left alone, offer solid reasons for hope. Meanwhile, the usual glorious images of the natural world we’re all familiar with from his decades-long broadcasting career look even more resplendent on the big screen.

Veteran movie actor Lois Smith has racked up credits with everyone from James Dean and Elia Kazan to Steven Spielberg and Wes Anderson, so when she turns up in The Uninvited as a forgotten actor called Helen who gatecrashes a Hollywood party in a confused state thinking that she still lives in the home she once owned in her heyday, her presence packs a poignant punch. It also catalyses a dark night of the soul for the party’s attendees, not least hosts Sammy (Walton Goggins) and Rose (Elizabeth Reiser), whose marriage is soon revealed to be hanging on by a thread as the presence of the elderly Helen stirs up resentments about their respective careers (Sammy’s an agent, Rose is an actor and mother), as well as existential questions about the ephemeral nature of fame and success in an industry that pays too much attention to such metrics.

Writer/director Nadia Connors (who’s married to Goggins in real life) offers a sharp insider view of this privileged, but frequently over-leveraged, tier of the film industry, feeding Reiser most of the best lines to underscore the casual misogyny of the business for women over 40. Rufus Sewell (as a megalomaniacal director client of Sammy’s) and Pedro Pascal (as an old flame of Rose’s whose movie stardom eclipsed her career) bring additional weight to the drama, but it’s Smith who anchors it in something meaningful.

Desire: The Carl Craig Story does what its title promises: serves up an intimate portrait of the pioneering Detroit techno producer whose work has been key to shaping dance music over the last 30 years. The film shows how he built on the legacy of the previous generation’s Derek May to help broaden what dance music could be, his influence spreading to the club scenes in Britain and Europe just as EDM was starting to become a global phenomenon. Intercutting talking head interviews, tour diaries and a wealth of archival footage, it doubles up as a lively insight into an under-covered area of music history.

The Surfer and The Uninvited are in cinemas from 9 May; Ocean with David Attenborough and Desire: The Carl Craig Story are in cinemas from 8 May