One of 2025’s best thriller movies is finally available to stream at home

Directed by an Irish filmmaker, the thriller stars an Oscar-winner, alongside another famed actor in one of his final roles.

Newly streaming via NOW, the movie sees Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage (Leaving Las Vegas) play the unnamed title character, a recently divorced man trying to reconnect with his estranged son (Finn Little).

As part of this, Cage's character returns to Luna Bay, the idyllic Australian coastal town of his childhood, to try and purchase his dream house and surf with his boy.

His plan to hit the waves with his son is thwarted, however, by a gang of hyper-masculine locals (led by a fantastic Julian McMahon, in one of his final roles before his death). The group's mantra is "Don't live here, don't surf here."

Humiliated and angry, Cage's surfer is "drawn into a conflict that keeps rising in concert with the punishing heat of the summer and pushes him to his breaking point".

The Surfer premiered at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival in 2024 before getting an Irish and UK cinema release last May.

Inspired by Ozploitation movies and the John Cheever story The Swimmer - as well as its subsequent 1968 screen adaptation - The Surfer is a stylish, unpredictable, darkly funny, wild ride.

The more time Cage's surfer spends on Luna Bay, being bullied by the locals under the searing hot sun, the more hallucinatory and psychedelic the film becomes.

Soon enough, the viewer feels almost like the lead character, trapped in a sun-bleached nightmare and not knowing whether to laugh or cry at the insanity director Finnegan and writer Thomas Martin (Prime Target) have cooked up.

In fact, the film would make a great double bill with other recent JOE recommendation The Seeding (now streaming on Prime Video).

The Surfer earned very positive reviews upon release, with it holding an 85% Rotten Tomatoes score. You can read a sample of some of these reviews below:

The Daily Beast: "Cage makes a meal of it, attuning himself to director Lorcan Finnegan’s wacked-out frequency to deliver another tour-de-force of grief, regret, anguish, and seriously psychotic fury."

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

Mashable: "Everything about The Surfer's one-line pitch sounds ridiculous, but the film itself is a haunting set piece about localism, repressed memory, and toxic masculinity, boasting the wild ride we've come to associate with Cage."

Radio Times: "The screeching, wildlife-filled soundtrack, over-saturated colours and sweaty heat-shimmers perfectly complement [the lead character's] mental decline. It's a hard watch at times, but Cage is magnificent - and the laughs, while uncomfortable, are plentiful."

Subculture Entertainment: "A brilliant mind-bending thriller that keeps the audience guessing from start to finish. Cage is amazing in a role that only he could pull off."

Tribune News Experience: "A heady, hypnotic experience that works in tandem with Cage’s performance of a man losing himself to find where he belongs."

The Surfer is currently available to stream in Ireland and the UK on the service NOW.