The sunburnt thriller-comedy, which premiered at a midnight screening at Cannes, also birthed a new Cage catchphrase. Photo: Lorcan Finnegan/Cannes

The energy at last night’s midnight Cannes screening was particularly electric, with the crowd screaming and bellowing before the film had even begun. They were losing their shit, appropriately, at the sight of Nicolas Cage, who looked equally thrilled as he walked into the Lumiere for the premiere of The Surfer, a deliciously bonkers, sunburnt psychological-thriller-slash-dark comedy about a man who just wants to surf, and will risk everything he has to do it.

While the latest from Irish filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan has some surprising moments of political and emotional depth, it’s primarily operating on a ‘70s-B-movie wavelength, full of psychedelic slow-zooms, woozy daydream sequences and ominous flashbacks, winks to New Wave Australian cinema, and another perfectly wild-eyed performance from Cage to add to his pantheon of such performances. He spends the whole movie soaking in his preferred sea of pathos and madness.

The Surfer kicks off as Cage, whose character goes unnamed, drives his also nameless son (Finn Little) to the stunning Australian beach he grew up on, giving him a strained fatherly pep talk on the way about how you “can’t stop a wave…you either surf it, or you get wiped out.” His son is unmoved, and Cage looks at him wryly: “That was my best surfing as a metaphor for life speech. I was hoping for more enthusiasm.” Cage’s character is visibly desperate: to connect with his son, who seems to live primarily with his soon-to-be ex-wife; to live in his past, which he’s tried to recapture by leveraging all of his assets to purchase his own childhood home; to remain in denial about his failed marriage, which seems to have faltered due to his workaholism but, as he describes to his financial advisor, he’ll be able to revive once he just gets this house and this beach back. The only thing standing in his way is another potential buyer, who just upped their bid by $100,000, and a gang of debauched, vaguely insane local surfers who refuse to let Cage and his son surf at the beloved beach of his childhood.

As Cage and his son descend upon the Edenlike shores, a burly man storms out of the sparkling water, sporting a Santa hat. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” he yells, over and over. Cage argues with him about whether or not the beach is public — it is, technically, but these men have long occupied it extralegally — before another extremely tan, ripped man named Scally (Julian McMahon) approaches, sporting a bright red beach poncho and a sinister twinkle in his eye. He’s the local group’s leader, and he warns Cage to get off the beach — he doesn’t want this smoke. Fearing for his son’s safety as the sinister beach boys surround them, Cage relents and walks back up to the parking lot.

But he doesn’t leave. In fact, he never leaves. The rest of the movie takes place in this parking lot, the surrounding brush, and on the beach below, with Cage slowly losing all of his belongings, his mind, and his grip on reality as he engages in both psychological and physical warfare with what is revealed, ultimately, to be some kind of Jordan Peterson-esque cult. He spies the men doing strange, violent rituals at night (“Before you can surf, you must suffer,” they chant as they brand each other with a wave symbol), and finds Scally’s Instagram videos, in which he rants about how men must be able to have a place to exorcize their primal urges with impunity. This is all played at a slight tilt — it’s spooky, but it’s also very funny.

Emboldened and enraged, Cage haunts the beach parking lot for days, turning redder and bloodier and increasingly miserable. He calls the local cops, who turn out to be in cahoots with the cult. He pleads for help from locals, who hand-wave away the Clockwork-Orange behavior. “Boys will be boys!” says one woman, who explains that their unchecked beach barbarity is better than if these boys went home and “beat the Botox” out of their wives. He ignores a local man (Nic Cassim) — who’s long lived out of his own car in the parking lot — until he needs to borrow the man’s binoculars for spying. He barters for them with an expensive pair of sunglasses, which sets off a sort of domino effect of Cage parting with all of his material belongings. The beach boys torment him with a series of mind-fuck pranks and manipulations that result in him losing his watch, then his phone, then his wedding ring, then his car. He loses his shoes, then walks on (intentionally scattered?) broken glass.

Nobody is better at believably playing out this sort of increasing mania than Cage. He tears up at regular intervals as the camera zooms dramatically into his eyes. He rages and moans and sobs. He chugs non-potable water, gagging and spitting. He is so unbelievably sunburned. At the apotheosis of his despair, he is bitten by a rat, then beats it to death against the homeless man’s car (which he’s now living in). Soon thereafter, starving, Cage yanks the dead rat from the ground and holds it to his teeth, about to take a bite. He looks up and sees a local man staring at him in fear, then running away. He has a brief moment of clarity and stuffs the rat in his pocket instead.

Later, in a waterlogged physical altercation with one of the local surfers, Cage pulls the rat out of his pocket and stuffs it into the man’s mouth. “Eat the rat!” he screams. “Eat the rat!” The Cannes audience roared at the line, which seems all but guaranteed to join the rich Nic Cage Quotable Canon, alongside “Put the bunny back in the box,” “I lost my hand, I lost my bride,” “Not the bees!” et al.

Cage himself called back to the line immediately at the end of the screening, when he took the mic and thanked the festival and the fans, saying that he’d last been at the festival “for a little film called Wild at Heart,” which won the Palme d’Or in 1990. He grinned at the adoring crowd, then asked festival director Thierry Friemaux how to say “eat the rat” in French. He looked back at the audience, then much to their delight, yelled into the mic, “Mangez les rat! Mangez le rat!”