Outback Noir, Localism, and the Limits of Belonging: Indigenous Presence in The Surfer

Lorcan Finnegan’s The Surfer (2024) is not really a surf film. It is a psychedelic horror that transposes the 1970s Australian “Outback Noir” tradition – specifically, Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (1971) – from the devilry of the country’s interior to the contested space of the beach. Part satire and part homage, The Surfer employs the visual language of Ozploitation as well as its thematic concerns with outsiders stranded in hostile communities. However, it diverges from its predecessors by ignoring the class commentary and stifling boozy camaraderie that permeated works like Wake in Fright. Instead, The Surfer interrogates the intersection of toxic masculinity, virulent surf localism, and settler-colonial entitlement.  

With its exaggerated depiction of the “Bay Boys,” a surf gang parroting an exclusionary mantra (“Don’t live here, don’t surf here”), the film lampoons contemporary far-right ideologies and the cult of the manosphere. Yet The Surfer’s most radical departure from the Wake in Fright lineage lies in its inclusion of an Indigenous presence. This paper adopts a close textual analysis alongside a genre comparison with Wake in Fright to investigate how The Surfer reframes the Outback Noir genre by contrasting the violent, performative localism of white settler characters with the quiet, grounding agency of the film’s only Indigenous figure, The Photographer (Larrakia Aboriginal Australian actress, Miranda Tapsell). In a narrative defined by the exclusion of outsiders, how does the film utilise her character to expose the hollowness of settler claims to belonging? And to what extent does her presence challenge or tokenise the historical erasure of Indigenous peoples in Australian genre cinema?

In Finnegan’s claustrophobic revenge thriller, Nicolas Cage, known only as The Surfer, returns to Luna Bay, the beachside hamlet of his youth, in hopes of reconnecting with his teenage son, buying his old beachside family home, and somehow resurrecting a simpler, mythical past. But plans to surf with his kid are brutally thwarted by a surf gang jealously guarding the beach from outsiders. They are led by the charismatic Scally (Julian McMahon), a latter-day surf guru constantly robed in a red-hooded beach towel who espouses New Age hyper masculinity while enforcing the laws of localism (“Don’t live here, don’t surf here”). Quickly and violently, the upwardly mobile returnee’s desire to buy his ancestral home and enjoy the waves with his son escalates into an increasingly brutal confrontation with the locals, who subject the would-be Surfer to a series of psychological torments and physical humiliations. 

Once the man hits rock bottom, he transforms into an agent of vengeance. Broke, destitute, ravaged by thirst and mad from the heat, The Surfer tries to reassert his bruised masculinity, reclaim memories of his damaged past, and finally hit the waves. Only after his pivot to unbridled violence is he finally accepted into the surf gang. Scally welcomes him into his posse after an initiation ceremony where The Surfer joins in their destruction and burns down the car of a homeless man, the Bum (Nicholas Cassim), similarly stranded in the same parking lot. Up to this point, Finnegan had suggested a cautionary resemblance between The Surfer and The Bum, as though the Surfer was the other man’s double, doomed to head down the same chasm. Like Cage’s character, The Bum is trapped in past traumas. He can’t let go of the loss of his son and dog and can’t move out of the car park’s limbo. By the end of the film, Cage’s drifter effectively replaces the Bum. But what prevents him from finally enjoying the swell is the realisation that, by reverting to violence and savagery, he has sacrificed his morality and relationship with his son just to reclaim a fevered adolescent fantasy. Haunted by the memory of losing his father on that same beach when he was a still boy, The Surfer grasps that he must leave this cherished place lest he repeat that cycle with his son. 

Julian McMahon as Scally in The Surfer

OUTBACK NOIR

For a genre film where most of the action takes place in the purgatory of a beach car park overlooking a sumptuous, turquoise ocean, The Surfer may appear to have wandered far from the familiar red dust coordinates of Outback Noir classics such as Wake in Fright, Ivan Sen’s Mystery Road (2013), and Robert Connolly’s The Dry (2021). There are no vast, endless plains, no lonely, deranged schoolteachers, no dying mining towns or remote highways that go nowhere. The Surfer is a homage to 70s Ozploitation cinema and a reframing of the Outback Noir tradition that relocates the frazzled outsider from the bush to the blazing heat of the beach. Outback Noir is what happens when the sun is so bright that it starts casting moral shadows; when it is so hot that people’s civility melts away, exposing buried legacies of violence and unresolved trauma. The Surfer inhabits precisely this terrain. 

Despite the coastal setting, Finnegan’s film shares many of the qualities of Outback Noir. Here too, the unforgiving heat, seething localism, isolation from urbane civility, and the harsh environment lead to moral corrosion and unsentimental violence. Truth and hidden histories are revealed under the merciless sun; perversely, the protagonist’s epiphanies only arise through suffering and hallucinations, the sunstroke sharpening his moral clarity.

In a number of interviews, Finnegan explicitly connected The Surfer to Ozploitation cinema, professed his love for Wake in Fright, and framed his film as an “outsider” story of masculine cruelty and psychological entrapment in an Australian landscape.¹ He described wanting the audience to be trapped in Cage’s perspective as he becomes dehydrated and disoriented, so that “when he doesn’t know what’s real or not, neither will the audience.”² It’s a strategy that closely echoes the heat‑addled, lysergic descent into the suffocating hell of outback hospitality that befalls schoolteacher John Grant (Gary Bond) in Wake in Fright. “Many films have channelled the woozy, sunstruck look of Wake in Fright,” Luke Buckmaster notes at The Guardian Australia, “but few have conjured a scorched earth aesthetic like Lorcan Finnegan’s nightmarish head trip – and none (until now!) have starred Nicolas Cage”.³

Some of the strongest connections between Wake in Fright and The Surfer are aesthetic: the bleached horizons, shimmering heat, leering locals, and close-ups of perspiring bodies. The Surfer’s trippy, woozy moments resonate with John Grant’s delusions after his entanglement with Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence) in Kotcheff’s film. Cage’s visions are flashbacks to his childhood and father’s death, mixed with others that suggest he has somehow become The Bum – an ominous doubling projection that is exploited for its phantasmagorical potential much like Grant’s chimeric visions of Tydon. As a homage, The Surfer employs the thematic architecture and affective intensities that Wake in Fright established as the foundational example of Outback Noir. 

In Wake in Fright, sunlight is not just illumination; it is an interrogation. John Grant is trapped in a town that feels geographically vast but is socially claustrophobic. Similarly in The Surfer, the beachside car park becomes a bleached-out showground offering Cage’s character no respite from humiliation and degradation. Even the public toilet gives him no opportunity for concealment or escape. The brightness of the landscape exposes weakness, and the proximity of the camera heightens the sense that the protagonist is being judged both by the environment and the beachside community. Like the Yabba, the town where John Grant gets stranded on his way to Sydney, the vast coastal openness and the car park’s liminal space become a psychological trap for The Surfer, who cannot leave because he has lost his money and pride. In the same way that the kangaroo hunt in Wake in Fright becomes a ceremonial bonding over violence that sends John Grant into a beer-soaked hallucination, the humiliating rituals The Surfer is subject to push Cage’s character into a surreal sunstroke experience that suggests a psychological unravelling.  

Like other Outback Noir films, The Surfer captures a tight-knit community that protects its own and conceals darker impulses. Similarly to the rough and tumble residents of the Yabba, the surfers of Luna Bay operate as a closed and complex social order bound by loyalty and psychological intimidation. Everyone from the local policeman, barista, real estate agent, and banker belongs to this network and conspires to humiliate and torment Cage’s drifter. Seemingly spurred by Scally, the coordinated harassment slowly destabilises The Surfer, pushing him to self-doubt and making him question his memory and sanity.   

Nic Cage losing his grip on reality in The Surfer

Wake in Fright and The Surfer both stage male bonding as ritualised degradation and violence as a debased form of social cohesion. Yet they differ in how they understand belonging. In Finnegan’s film, the surf gang is obsessed with territorial control and cultural gatekeeping. Belonging is contingent on a number of factors: living locally, conforming to the rules of hyper masculinity, and obeying Scally’s authority. By contrast, while John Grant also roams Wake in Fright as an outsider, he does not suffer exclusion so much as a stifling form of inclusion. The Yabba men throw open their doors and drown him with their alcohol-fuelled generosity. Their exultant hospitality becomes suffocating as it enforces jovial inclusion at the expense of any sense of autonomy. To stop drinking causes outrage: it registers as an affront to their camaraderie and is seen as a display of a moral superiority. The locals are sincere in their welcome and their sense of mateship demands conformity. 

Comparably, it is only when The Surfer finally loses all sense of civility and attacks the gang that he is finally accepted into their ranks. At last, he speaks their tribal language. In the world of surfing, masculinity is authenticated through risk, physical power, and the ability to disassociate from the outside world. Once The Surfer sheds his materialist pretensions and embraces violence, he turns from an outsider into a gang member. Scally and the Bay Boys recognise in him a capacity for ferocity that fits their own code. However, just like in Wake in Fright, that turning point is morally corrosive, because inclusion is contingent on a series of compromises. The Surfer burns The Bum’s car and all his belongings; having finished his initiation process and submitted to Scally’s authority, he drinks and parties to the break of dawn. He is welcomed for what he has become as he conforms to the groups’ destructive ethos. But like John Grant, he remains uneasy with that transformation, finally realising that his only salvation is to escape the new community and its aggressive localist discourse.   

LOCALISM

Where The Surfer most poignantly diverges from Wake in Fright and other examples of the Outback Noir tradition is in its ironic depictions of localism, its satire of ritualised performances of toxic masculinity, and the presentation of the paradoxes of the desire for belonging. Doc Tydon’s emblematic line in Wake in Fright, “All the little devils are proud of hell!” translates comfortably into the milieu of the surf localists in The Surfer. The Yabba’s permanently sozzled doctor, living in contented squalor, explains the boozy, brutal outback peculiarities of the Yabba’s masculinity to the mild-mannered schoolteacher, John Grant. Rather than being ashamed of their crude behaviour (kangaroo hunts, endless drinking, sexual coercion), the town’s men celebrate it as authentic and charming. “Discontent is the luxury of the well‑to‑do,” Doc Tydon remarks. “If you’ve got to live here, then you might as well like it.” Tydon has accepted the darkness within men and learned to live off it, and his dark sage sagacity resonates with Scally’s jabber, who amplifies the manosphere with such philosophical pearls as “destroy so that you can rebuild,” and “before you surf, you must suffer!” 

“[The Surfer] pokes fun at this hyper-masculine group of guys,” Finnegan has said of his film. “It’s also an examination of masculinity in crisis, and how these guys like Scally are very charismatic and convincing … [and] can easily persuade younger guys, who are looking for belonging, to get sucked into their little world.”⁴ In order to join the gang, The Surfer must first suffer and forsake his individuality. The assumption is that all other members have gone through similar humiliations and painful initiation rituals; that is what binds them together. The Surfer’s pathway to acceptance is paved by his complete degradation and his seemingly qualifying turn to hysterical violence. With gambolling satire, The Surfer presents surf localism not as the love of a place, but as an exclusionary politics where belonging is weaponised into a right-wing ideology defined by charismatic masculine authority, murky laws, and the violent policing of borders.  

John Grant (Gary Bond) getting royally drunk in Wake in Fright

In Wake in Fright, no authoritarian leader presides over the Yabba, and no one is ever excluded from it – so long as they’re white, male, and happy to have another drink with a mate. Everyone in town is proud of surviving the harshness of the outback. For John Grant, the Yabba was terrifying because of its stifling hospitality and normalisation of brutality, a far cry from the Bay Boys’ exclusionary policing of the beach that Cage must confront in The Surfer. In its exploration of toxic masculinity and the right-wing cult of the manosphere, Finnegan’s film may invoke memories of the 2005 Cronulla Riots and the legacy of territorialism and racially coded nationalism that fuelled them. Toxic surf localism shares that same philosophy, underpinned as it is by the notion that because good waves are a scarce resource, local men have prior claims to those breaks by virtue of their historical presence on that beach and time spent in those waters. They are proud of their knowledge of the changing banks, the sea’s treacherous conditions, and all the memories of the suffering they have endured. Similarly, in the manosphere discourse, access to intimacy, opportunities, and socio-economic status are framed as scarce goods unfairly distributed by feminism, multiculturalism, and neoliberal labour markets. In both surfing and digital manosphere communities, there is a reassertion of “natural” hierarchies: the best surfers, like the most “alpha” among men, deserve more action. As Andrew Tate proclaims in the thirtieth of his 41 “tenets”, “I reserve the right to administer the difficult rites of passage for our young Men to allow them to earn the rank of Manhood”.⁵ The manosphere has borrowed heavily from surfing culture and its long history of male rituals and exclusionary, discriminatory practices, all too often written off as a type of natural localism. Per Rebecca Olive:

Darkness, discrimination and exclusion are a large part of going surfing too… These days we talk about this kind of behaviour in terms of localism, which is a soft word for a highly exclusionary practice. A practice linked to colonisation and racist politics. And yet, for so long, surfing has celebrated these kinds of practices as integral to what we do, to our own sense of belonging.⁶

Given how little surfing there is in Finnegan’s film, the policing of boundaries and aggressive territorialism through which resident surfers deter the kooks and would-be tourists from their area rings hollow as a commitment to protecting a local identity. Satirising the perversity of surf culture is easy: the very culture that celebrates freedom, individuality, and natural beauty simultaneously enforces rigid conformity and ignores the environment in favour of getting wasted and preventing others from enjoying the beach. The Bay Boys’ refrain, “Don’t live here, Don’t Surf Here!” is effectively a boundary marker. They do not protect marine life, help nippers to embrace the ocean, or care for the ecology of the sand dunes. The Surfer highlights how localism is a destructive and misguided ideology that in seeking to protect an imaginary community fails to prioritise care and stewardship by overdetermining the focus on exclusion. As one surf writer puts it, “anybody still pushing that ‘80s brand of toxic localism needs to get their head checked. It’s gone the way of landlines and affordable housing.”⁷ However, just like the capacity to survive and flourish in the outback shaped a sense of meritocracy among characters in Wake in Fright, so too does surviving the initiation ceremonies associated with surfing in Finnegan’s film. The beach belongs to everyone, but time in the water, talent, and a certain aggressive attitude still dictates the surf hierarchy. Easy to satirise as they may be, these generational rituals nonetheless remain meaningful for a certain community still bound together by heteronormativity, whiteness, and a colonial mindset.

INDIGENOUS PRESENCE AND THE PHOTOGRAPHER

As a counterpoint to the toxic localism and its mishmash cosplay of tribal manosphere (notice Scally’s face painted ochre during Cage’s initiation party), The Surfer offers  a critique of settler-colonial relations through the inclusion an Indigenous character known only as The Photographer. The irony is inescapable: of all the film’s beachgoers, the only person willing to support a man with a foreign accent and deteriorating mental health is a First Nations woman who makes no overt claims on the beach. 

Miranda Tapsell as The Photographer in The Surfer

Few Outback Noir or Ozploitation films prior to John Hillcoat’s The Proposition (2005) included Indigenous characters. Neither Wake in Fright (1971) nor Colin Eggleston’s Long Weekend (1978), to name two classics, feature any significant First Nations presence. The absence is consistent with a historical bias across Australian cinema to limit, erase or stereotype Indigenous representation, even and especially within films set in landscapes where one would expect Indigenous people and culture to be prominent. The Surfer rectifies this absence by portraying The Photographer as a positive, caring, empathetic and supportive character. She is not explicitly marked as an Indigenous woman, but audiences would recognise Miranda Tapsell from her unambiguously Indigenous roles in Top End Wedding (2019), Black Comedy (2014-2020), Redfern Now (2012-2013), and especially The Sapphires (2012). The only character to treat Nicolas Cage’s broken protagonist with kindness, she bonds with him over their shared creative ventures and elicits his backstory: before he became a status-driven businessman, the man used to be a surf mag writer, chasing waves around the world free from the demands of corporate life or the cycle of trauma associated with Luna Bay.

Scarce and brief as her appearances might be, The Photographer is nonetheless a pivotal character. She offers The Surfer her phone, gives him water just as he’s spiralling from dehydration and, most importantly, grants him a transformative opportunity and moment of clarity by showing him a photograph she took of him early into the film. The image corroborates his memories: no, he is not going crazy, he does exist, and his story is at least partially true as opposed to some hallucination. 

However, it is worth noting that The Photographer isn’t a fully-fledged character so much as a trope, whose main task is to highlight the Bay Boy’s ideological paradoxes and prompt the protagonist to question his transformation from victim to aggressor. The loudest and most vicious voices in Luna Bay are descendants of white settlers, anxious about their own precarious ownership of this idyllic beach. The Photographer, in turn, doesn’t claim ownership of the land. She doesn’t enforce any rules, nor does she police belonging. Yet her presence exposes the contradictions at the heart of the “locals only” ideology and their claim of some sort of ancestral entitlement over stolen land. “You need to forget this place,” she warns Cage’s character late into the film, “You’re just not meant to be here.” It is partly thanks to her advice that The Surfer finally realises that the only way to escape his past traumas and avoid passing them on to his son is to flee Luna Bay and give up his fantasy to own a piece of that dreamland. 

CONCLUSION

While The Surfer shares much of its DNA with Outback Noir classics, it destabilises some of their tropes and expectations, satirising surf culture’s toxic localism, and addressing the absence of Indigenous characters in the genre’s early entries. The Surfer represents a reframing of Outback Noir, where the contested space of the beach replaces the bush as a source of fear and wonder, secrets and traumas, and buried secrets hiding in plain sight. Finnegan’s film is both a homage to Wake in Fright and a satire of its toxic localism, which the director achieves through pointed commentary on the white settlers’ entitlement, delusions of ownership, and appropriation of tribal rituals. And it contrasts the performative localism of the Bay Boys with the quieter, more grounded agency of The Photographer. The film’s only Indigenous character is also, crucially, the one responsible for shaping the protagonist’s transformation and challenging his and our own notions of belonging.

Endnotes