Producers: Leonora Darby, James Harris, Robert Connolly, James Grandison, Brunella Cocchiglia, Nicolas Cage and Nathan Klingher   Director: Lorcan Finnegan   Screenplay: Thomas Martin   Cast: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon, Nic Cassim, Miranda Tapsell, Alexander Bertrand, Justin Rosniak, Rahel Romahn, Finn Little, Adam Sollis, Charlotte Maggi, Rhys James, Tim Hawkin and Greg McNeill   Distributor: Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions

Grade: B-

A heady head trip that proves an effective if sometimes exasperating vehicle for Nicolas Cage’s peculiar brand of gonzo desperation, Lorcan Finnegan’s “The Surfer” is set entirely at a single location—a secluded Australian beach. and its surrounding woods. Thomas Martin bookends the screenplay with moments of Cage at his most restrained—a relative term in his case, to be sure—but the plot involves his unnamed character, called simply “The Surfer” in the credits, deteriorate until his “civilized” persona is all but eradicated.

The source of the man’s disintegration is the frustration of his aim to rebuild his life.  When he arrives in the parking lot from which steps descend to the beach, he’s driving a gleaming Lexus with his teen son (Finn Little) in the passenger seat. He seems a successful if too-eager-to impress businessman who’s taken the boy out of school to bring him to surf, expounding at length about riding the waves as an existential metaphor for life itself. 

But his ebullience conceals the fact that his life is falling apart.  The boy is concerned that his father has removed him from class without permission from his mother, who’s separated from his dad and has custody of their son (as well as a fiancé).  But his father has a purpose: he aims to show the boy the house on the cliff above the beach he’s at point of buying—his grandfather’s place, where he spent his childhood until, after his father’s death when he was fifteen, his mother moved him with her to California.  Its acquisition, he believes, will bring their family together again. (The long absence from Down Under explains, supposedly, his lack of an Australian accent.)

But when father and son don wetsuits and pick up boards to go down to the beach, they’re stopped by a bunch of locals, one of whom, gruff Pitbull (Alexander Bertrand), incongruously wearing a Santa hat, tells them only those who live there can surf there.  That’s confirmed less nastily by Scally (Julian McMahon), the guru-like leader of the bunch of rowdies who control the place, a robed life couch who pontificates about emasculated men who must recapture their natural virility and orates that to surf, one must first suffer (and, apparently, get drunk, baptized and branded).  The son wisely takes the opportunity to depart for home.

But not Cage’s dad.  He stays, smoldering over having been humiliated in front of his boy by the rich bully he remembers from his youth.  He stays for days, living in his car, as he tries to deal with his broker (Greg McNeill) and real estate agent (Rahel Romahn) to secure the added funds he needs to close on the house before another bidder buys it.  Gradually denuded of his car, surfboard, phone, wedding ring and even shoes, he’s reduced to the status of a bedraggled beggar drinking filthy water from a public restroom and pondering eating a dead rat while avoiding a menacing dog; in the end he’s worse off than the rumpled old man (Nic Cassim) he encounters living out of a battered pickup, who blames Scally for the death of both his son and his dog.  Calling the police does no good, since the cop played by Justin Rosniak proves a pal of Scally’s and scoffs at the protagonist as a simple vagrant.

Punctuating the protagonist’s repeated humiliations are flashbacks to his youth on the beach.  We see him (Rhys James) running down the beach and glimpsing the corpse of his father (Tim Hawkin) lying on the shore, the waves lapping over the body.  Scally, bringing him a plate of food from the barbecue he hosts for family and friends over the holiday, adds to the ostensibly friendly gesture a reminder he should leave, as well as cruel remarks about how his father died and what he’s made of himself since.

The issue, of course, is whether what we’re being shown is reality or the dad’s hallucination.  Is Scally really orchestrating everything?  Do the Bay Boys, as they call themselves, really beat up a foreign dude who tries to take his family out surfing?  Does the clerk at the parking lot food shack (Adam Sollis) actually demand that he turn over his watch in return for recharging his phone and giving him a cup of coffee?  Might the old bum really be him in the future?  Even sympathetic passersby, like the photographer (Miranda Tapsell) who lends him her phone to call the broker and realtor who appear to be selling him out, obviously wonder if he’s just a hysteric.

And yet after everything Cage’s beaten-down outsider makes his apparent peace with Scally.  He undergoes initiation, complete with what the seventies-inspired plot requites—a psychedelic episode, complete with hazily nightmarish visuals from Radek Ladczuk, whose brilliant widescreen shots of turquoise waves and azure skies are as striking as the grim interiors he brought to “The Babadook.”  Finnegan, who has a knack for instilling disquiet and disorientation (see his earlier film “Vivarium”), works with editor Tony Cranstoun and sound designer Aza Hand to do so again here, even as François Tétaz contributes a swooning, often playful score that would suit a seventies romance. 

Cage, of course, throws himself into the lead role with absolute abandon, though at the beginning and again toward the close he proves he can still show restraint when he wishes. McMahon brings the requisite tone of sneering menace to Scally, and Cassim holds nothing back as the obsessive old man whose intervention brings matters to an end. 

But while “The Surfer” holds one’s interest, in the end it’s ultimately a puzzle that, despite the efforts to tie things up into a relatively coherent—and meaningful—whole by the end, remains too enigmatic and elliptical to fully satisfy.  It’s like a cinematic hangover, leaving you woozy and more than a little weary, scratching your head and wondering if it was worth it.