Moments before The Surfer premiered at Cannes, the 45-year-old Irish director Lorcan Finnegan had a unique message for the star of his film, Nicolas Cage. “We were walking up the red carpet,” Finnegan tells me over a video call from his home in Dublin. “I said to him, ‘Eat the rat.’ It was like I was saying, ‘Good luck.’”
I tell Finnegan I didn’t know that “eat the rat” was a way of wishing positivity for someone. “I was just joking,” he says. “But it got into his head. After the film played, he was like, ‘Eat the rat! Eat the rat!’”
The Surfer is many things. It’s a psychological freakout presented in 50 shades of orange. It’s a violent comedy with hints of Ozploitation. It’s a satire about toxic masculinity and localism amongst beach bros. Above all, though, it’s a film where Cage grabs a dead rodent, sticks it into a surfer’s mouth, and screams the immortal, very meme-able line: “Eat the rat!”
Presenting the limits of how much suffering one man can endure, The Surfer stars Cage as a father visiting Australia to purchase a house, but then ends up in his own living hell. Due to a series of Kafkaesque calamities, Cage’s anonymous character (he’s “The Surfer” in the end credits) finds himself starving and homeless; unable to access his credit card or phone, he has no money or friends. Adding insult to his many injuries, he’s not even able to surf: the locals don’t allow outsiders to test their glorious waters.
Here comes the film’s other memorable quote, repeated as a mantra by the surfers: “Don’t live here, don’t surf here.” In The Surfer, which could also be called The Sufferer, the male gang have their own outdated beliefs about gender, diet, and surfing. One piece of advice from their leader, Scally (Julian McMahon): the “modern man” has found life to be too easy. According to Finnegan, it’s a satire of people who listen to Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. “It pokes fun at this hyper-masculine group of guys,” says the director. “It’s like kids not letting another kid play in their treehouse. But it’s also an examination of masculinity in crisis, and how these guys like Scally are very charismatic and convincing with their philosophical ideas. They can easily persuade younger guys, who are looking for belonging, to get sucked into their little world.”
How have surfers reacted to being depicted as sexist, vicious weirdoes? “A lot of surfers helped us on the movie,” says Finnegan. “They haven’t seen the film yet.” He tells me that the film was inspired by the Bay Boys, a surfer gang in California’s Lunada Bay. “It’s this crescent-shaped bay with big, modernist, expensive houses perched up on the hilltop. They’re all owned by hedge fund managers, doctors, and lawyers. If you try to surf their beach, they’ll actually attack you violently.”
They’re like a cult? “I don’t know if they are like a cult. It’s not like in our film. But they’re definitely a group of yuppie, violent surf guys.” Finnegan, the director of Without Name, Vivarium, and Nocebo, got Cage on board by sending him Thomas Martin’s screenplay and a personal note. Cage, a fan of Vivarium, watched Nocebo and requested a meeting. “I told him the vibe I was going for,” says Finnegan. “We have a similar sense of humour.”
It’s also an examination of masculinity in crisis, and how these guys like Scally are very charismatic and convincing with their philosophical ideas. They can easily persuade younger guys, who are looking for belonging, to get sucked into their little world – Lorcan Finnegan
Finnegan started his career making comedy shorts for Charlie Brooker’s company, Zeppotron, after watching Unnovations on TV in 2001 and writing them a letter. While his features aren’t strictly joke-a-thons, they provoke nervous laughter: Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots driving through endless roads in Vivarium; Eva Green’s descent into madness in Nocebo.
However, The Surfer is funny, even if the gags aren’t really gags when written down. In fact, “eat the rat” wasn’t even in the script. In an early sequence, the Surfer is crawling around a car park, searching for sustenance. He drinks from a puddle, considers chewing on a burrito crawling with maggots, and then ponders if a dead rat would solve his hunger. “On the day Nick put this prop rat into his pocket,” says Finnegan. “The art department was like, ‘Nick, we need it back.’ He was like, ‘No, I need to keep it.’”
Cage kept the rat in his pocket throughout filming without knowing when it would re-emerge. Before a fight scene with gang member Pitbull (Alexander Bertrand), Cage told Finnegan about Billy Wilder’s 1954 drama Sabrina, in which Humphrey Bogart takes an olive, shoves it into another man’s mouth, and utters, “Eat it.” Cage suggested they do the same, just with a rat. “We did a quick test in the car park to see if it would choke [Bertrand],” says Finnegan. “And then we shot it in the water. It was very funny. Then when we were editing the film, Nick texted me, saying, ‘Did eat the rat make it?’ It was on his mind the whole time.”
As for The Surfer devouring raw eggs from a bird’s nest halfway through the film? Finnegan puts it more down to storytelling than shock value: the character needs energy for the “eat the rat” showdown. “A bird shits on his shoulder,” says the director. “So he thinks about bird eggs.” In what, to me, felt like a gross-out moment, Cage eats the raw eggs for real, allowing the yolk to run down his face. Finnegan clarifies that they were actually quail eggs from a local farm. “Nick’s eaten all sorts of weird stuff, I’m sure. But he eats raw quail eggs on sushi.”
With a painterly aesthetic to The Surfer – the burnt reds convey the heat, the cool turquoise of the water taps into salvation – it’s fitting that Finnegan’s next feature, Goliath, was inspired by a painting of David and Goliath by Orazio Gentileschi from 1607. “Me and the writer, Garret Shanley, were sat there, disgusted, and it sparked ideas. We’re starting to cast it. It’s a dystopic fable about creating monsters in order to start wars.”
In order to wish Finnegan good luck with Goliath, I use the only words appropriate for this scenario: “Eat the rat.”
“Yes, thank you,” says Finnegan. “Eat the rat!”
The Surfer is out now in UK cinemas.
