Avis des critiques

With a committed, crazed, brilliantly calibrated performance from late-Renaissance Cage, this is a feverishly good thriller: surreal and strange and sticky.

The final conflagration is as excessive as what’s gone before. But Nicolas Cage... has an intensity that breaks the mould and that’s just about reason enough to watch.

[The Surfer] is a lurid psychological horror that’ll thrill midnight movie crowds and another leftfield entry in its lead’s recent purple patch. Post-studio-era Cage is picking roles with real bite.

The Surfer fits Cage like a glove. It’s another one to add to his list of must-see, maniacal performances, illustrating his incomparable commitment to the craft.

The Surfer is what you might call a slow-burn Cage. There’s the manic, hollering prize at the end... 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.

The Surfer is a highly original piece that works on its own increasingly crazed terms... Following a path from GQ-man moneyed arrogance to soul-shredded abjection, Cage is as compelling and as dramatically coherent as in any of his best recent work.

[A] fascinating, weird, freaky drama... For all its unpleasantness, [The Surfer] 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.

[The Surfer] may interest Cage scholars who might be fascinated by the parallels between this one and “Vampire’s Kiss”... On the other hand, those without that level of investment are more likely to find it a strange and not entirely successful cinematic freak-out that has its moments thanks to another unique turn from Cage, but never quite figures out how to pull them all together into a reasonably satisfying whole.

[The Surfer] is a film in which the mythic crashes into the ridiculous, the intersection where its star Nicolas Cage has also staked his career... Audiences hoping for a gonzo bloodbath will be disappointed that Finnegan keeps his morality murky. But it’s the right choice. It bugs you just like “The Surfer” intends to, making the film follow you home like sand in your shoes.

If there was ever an actor to elevate pulpy, not-fully formed genre material, it’s Cage... All he needs is a bluff above a beach to make “The Surfer” churn with the currents of a man tenuously close to being swept out to sea.

Cage is the best reason to watch “The Surfer,” a deliberately punishing drama... If this movie leaves Cage adrift, he doesn’t seem at all uncomfortable about it.

Being sold as a simple vigilante thriller, this is in fact a much fancier package of slippery reality amplified both by Cage’s disheveled desperation and a full gamut of disorienting audiovisual devices. It’s not perfect, but it’s a trip.