THE SURFER ★★ (MA15+) 101 minutes

I imagine tales of Maroubra’s Bra Boys may have helped inspire the tribe of Australian surfers giving Nicolas Cage a hard time in this film by Irish filmmakers Lorcan Finnegan and Thomas Martin, but in this case, fiction is much stranger than truth.

These boys have colonised their beach so completely that Cage’s character can’t get so much as a toe in the water.

He’s a divorced businessman who has been in the US for years, but now he’s back in Australia harbouring an urgent desire to buy a house overlooking the break he surfed as a kid.

He has brought his son with him so they can see the house and have an introductory dip. However, the exaggerated earnestness that makes Cage such an impersonators’ delight has already kicked in, and he’s wallowing so deeply in nostalgia that he hasn’t realised his boy doesn’t share his euphoria. Having spotted the dirty looks locals are casting in their direction, he’d rather be at school.

It came as no surprise to learn that Finnegan and Martin are fans of the Ozploitation films of the 1970s. Those were the days when certain Brits and Americans cherished the myth of Australia as a place where sharks leapt out of the surf at sunbathing tourists and kangaroos hopped along city streets, challenging shoppers to boxing matches. And the human inhabitants were just as savage – hence the success of Canadian director Ted Kotcheff’s adaptation of the Kenneth Cook novel Wake in Fright, the story of a gormless English schoolteacher barely surviving his first weekend in an Outback town.

You know from the start that Cage is going to fare just as badly. His doggy-eyed histrionics guarantee it. But naturally, he doesn’t see it that way. If he did, he’d go home to reconsider his real estate purchase and there would be no film.

Instead, he stays on after his son leaves, waiting for his real estate agent to confirm the house’s sale. And in just one day, he falls apart before our eyes, mocked by kookaburras, menaced by snakes and abused by the locals. They’re all in thrall to Scally (Julian McMahon), the surfers’ insufferable tribal leader, who has moulded the group into a cult devoted to the kind of alpha-male pretensions we now know as toxic masculinity. In practice, this means that Cage is subjected to much nudging, sneering and spitting before the boys start going to work on his Lexus, which he’s unwisely but typically left in the carpark.