Cage must go through Hell and back before he can say: “Surf’s Up.”

“The Surfer” is hot and sunny. And I mean that in the look and feel, as everything looks and feels bright, but is actually dark on the inside. It fills the color palette description quite well with the orange poster, yellow beaches, red skin complexions, the aqua ocean, and the green night sequences. All beautifully photographed by Radzek Ladczuk. And yet, it also shows us a crazy intention. The kind that nightmares are made of.

And given his impressive streak of crazy thrillers (like “Prisoners of the Ghostland,” “Sympathy for the Devil,” or “Dream Scenario”), Nicolas Cage is the leading man who fits the perfect description of a man losing his grip on reality with all the torment he must suffer. He plays a nameless surfer who returns to his homeland of Australia, and tries to reconnect with his son (Finn Little) with a little father-son surf, but they get rejected by a surfing gang, led by Scally (Julian McMahon), whose motto is: “Don’t live here, don’t surf here.” Hostile localism is what it is.

We see him hanging out at his car waiting for an important phone call regarding his mortgage deal for his childhood home and spying on this surfing gang. And as I’m watching him, I wonder why he can’t let those jerky guys go and get on with his life. I also wonder why he doesn’t have a portable phone charger or have all his credit cards on his phone. And he’s even willing to drink dirty water from the bathroom. At this point, he looks like he’s poised to become a beach bum bent on destroying himself.

All I know is that this movie is supposed to play like a nightmare where people constantly humiliate you without any apologies or morale, the police are zero help, and you’re unable to fight back. There are many mind games these locals are playing with him. Some regard laughter, some take his valuables, and some even act like they’re in tribes or hunting parties. Even Scally wears a red sweater that almost makes him look like a “Flinstones” character. But if I were Cage’s character, I wouldn’t tell if you won’t.

Some of the editing by Tony Cranstoun is a bit off with certain arms being placed at the wrong time and the torment gets exhausting with certain laughters and mocking, and both of them left me conflicted. But the torment makes sense once we get through it, and “The Surfer” delivers. And about the film playing like a nightmare, I was thinking about Ari Aster’s “Beau is Afraid” in which Joaquin Phoenix played a coward who couldn’t thrive against his tormenters and dealt with one crazy situation after another. I think that film is under-appreciated.

And now that I’m watching “The Surfer,” I’m seeing Cage’s character as a man who refuses to let some insults go and is even willing to make himself look bad just to make a point. I also like how McMahon, whose villain repertoire includes Doctor Doom in “Fantastic Four” (2005), couldn’t be more convincing as the gang leader. And I like to think he’s gotten some pointers from Willem Dafoe.

“The Surfer” was directed by Lorcan Finnegan, who also made “Without Name,” “Vivarium,” and “Nocebo,” and in his first collaboration with Cage, he chooses the right leading man with the right locations and the right nightmarish attitude. I, myself, often have nightmares where I have to deal with teasings. So, I know exactly what this movie is going for. And it looks and acts like a rainbow with a mean streak. It’s really quite gnarly, dudes.