The score for The Surfer never lets the tide go out

There is a frequency to ocean waves that sits just below the threshold of music. A pulse, not a rhythm; a repetition without variation. The wave arrives, breaks, withdraws, arrives again, and the interval between arrivals is close enough to regular that your body begins to anticipate it, to sync its breathing to the cycle, to accept the pulse as a kind of silence. This is what makes the ocean both calming and, under the right conditions, deeply unnerving. The regularity is a trap. Your nervous system locks onto the pattern and stops listening critically, and the moment it stops listening is the moment the pattern can be weaponised. The score for The Surfer understands this precisely, and it exploits it for the full duration of the picture.

The Surfer (2024), directed by Lorcan Finnegan, premiered at Cannes and arrived in cinemas carrying the weight of its premise: Nicolas Cage plays an unnamed man who returns to the Australian beach town of his childhood, attempts to access a surf break controlled by a group of territorial locals, and is systematically humiliated, brutalised and driven toward collapse. The film operates in the register of slow-burn psychological horror, and its score, composed by the Galway-based duo Natalie Murray Beale and James Latimer, is the mechanism by which the slow burn sustains itself.

The loop that never resolves

The central technique is deceptively simple. The score establishes a tonal loop early in the film, a low synthesiser figure that rises and falls in a pattern mimicking the period of a wave, roughly eight to twelve seconds per cycle. This figure does not develop. It does not modulate to a new key. It does not build toward a harmonic resolution. It simply repeats, with minor variations in texture and volume, across scene after scene, and the effect is cumulative in a way that conventional scoring is not. A conventional score marks dramatic beats: tension here, release here, climax here. Beale and Latimer’s score refuses to mark anything. The loop continues through moments of calm and moments of violence with the same indifference, and this indifference is what generates the dread. The ocean does not care what is happening on the beach. Neither does the score.

The surf-film tradition, inverted

Australian cinema has a long relationship with surf music. Morning of the Earth (1972) and its Albe Falzon-directed images of empty breaks and golden light established a template that persists: the surf film as pastoral, the ocean as freedom, the score as an expression of uncomplicated joy. The Atlantics, Surf City, the reverb-drenched guitar tone that became shorthand for coastal Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, all of it located the surf in a musical register of release. Even later, darker surf films like Drift (2013) and Breath (2017) scored their wave sequences with a kind of awe, the music rising as the surfer dropped into the wave, the swell of orchestral or ambient sound mirroring the swell of water.

The Surfer strips this tradition bare. There is no guitar. There is no melody that could be described as joyful or liberated. The ocean in this film is not a space of freedom; it is a territory, controlled and policed, and the score registers this by refusing the sonic language of surf cinema entirely. What replaces it is something closer to drone music, to the sustained-tone work of composers like Eliane Radigue or the heavier end of Tim Hecker’s catalogue: music that does not move forward but presses down, occupying space without traversing it.

Cage inside the frequency

Nicolas Cage’s performance in The Surfer is a study in sustained discomfort, and the score’s relentlessness mirrors his character’s entrapment. The man cannot leave the beach. He cannot access the surf. He is stuck in a car park, in the sand, on the periphery of a world he once belonged to, and the score keeps him there sonically. There is no musical cue that suggests escape or possibility or even the temporary relief of a scene change. The tonal loop follows him from exterior to interior, from daylight to darkness, from composure to breakdown. It is the sonic equivalent of a locked room.

What Beale and Latimer achieve with this approach is a collapse of the distinction between score and sound design. The synthesiser tones blend with the ambient sound of the ocean until the two become indistinguishable. You cannot tell where the waves end and the music begins, and this confusion is deliberate. The score has absorbed the ocean’s frequency and is feeding it back to you at a slightly altered pitch, just enough to register as wrong, not enough to identify why. Your body responds before your mind does. The unease is physical, located in the chest and the jaw, in the muscles that tighten when a sound is almost right but not quite.

The tide that stays in

The film’s climax, such as it is, does not bring the score to a crescendo. There is no fortissimo, no crash of percussion, no harmonic resolution that rewards the listener for enduring ninety minutes of tonal stasis. The loop continues. The frequency holds. If anything, the score becomes quieter in the final act, receding just enough that you become aware of how loud it has been, the way you become aware of a headache only when it begins to lift. This is the score’s final, sharpest move. It has been pressing against you for the entire film, and when it eases, the absence is worse than the presence, because the absence makes you realise how completely you had adapted to the pressure.

The Surfer is not a comfortable film, and its score is not comfortable music. It does the thing that the best film scores do and the thing that audiences least want them to do: it makes you feel something you did not choose to feel, and it does not let you stop feeling it until the credits roll. The tide does not go out. The loop does not resolve. The wave arrives, breaks, withdraws, arrives again, and you sit in the dark and you wait for it to stop, and it does not stop, and that is the whole point.