Nicolas Cage riding waves in Lorcann Finnegan’s The Surfer

THE SURFER

Lula’s lifelong lover returns to the Festival de Cannes. Following a career directed by some of the industry’s most established filmmakers, Nicolas Cage breaks new ground and rides the waves with Irish director Lorcann Finnegan, who makes his Official Selection debut with The Surfer, to be shown in a Midnight Screening.

Nicolas Cage plays a father returning to his Australian home after years in the United States. But when he takes his son to his childhood beach, a group of surfers stops him from accessing it. Humiliated, the father has no intention of leaving it there…

The last time Nicolas Cage came to the Croisette was for a special screening of Barbet Schroeder’s Kiss of Death  in 1995. Ten years prior, when his career was getting started, he discovered the joys of the Competition with Alan Parker’s Birdy  (which won the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury), before making an unforgettable mark with his rendition of “Love Me Tender” opposite Laura Dern in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart , the winner of the 1990 Palme d’or.

In recent years, Nicolas Cage has been busy with fresh, daring projects such as Dream Scenario by Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli, which earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy at the 2024 ceremony. With some 120 films to his name, the actor is as in tune as ever with the latest generation of directors.

And that’s exactly the case with Lorcan Finnegan, who recently received recognition for his dystopian thriller Vivarium (2020), in which a couple find themselves trapped in a strange suburban neighbourhood. For his third feature film, the Irish director could see no one other than Nicolas Cage playing the surfer pushed to breaking point.