Film

The Surfer opens with its Australian-American protagonist, played by Nicolas Cage, giving his teenage son a surf-inspired pep talk: the ocean, he says, is ‘pure energy’. And like life, either you learn to ride it ‘or you wipe out’. These words could well have come from Cage himself, an actor known for his self-described ‘nouveau shamanic’ performance style, whose late-career oeuvre seems designed to repeatedly bring the sixty-one-year-old to the brink of spiritual oblivion.

Ireland’s now infamous ‘mother and baby homes’ have been the subject of several films. Aisling Walsh’s Sinners (2002), Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters (2002), and Stephen Frear’s Philomena (2013), as well as numerous documentaries, have focused on the abuses suffered by the women detained in these homes and the fates of their children, many of them sold to wealthy families. According to the Irish Government’s 2021 Commission of Investigation into the homes, between 1922 and 1995, approximately 56,000 unmarried women and 57,000 children were detained, at least 9000 of the children not surviving their time in the institutions. As Claire Keegan writes in the Afterword to her 2021 novella, upon which this film is based, ‘Many girls and women lost their babies. Some lost their lives. Some or most lost the lives they would have had.’

Umberto Eco said of Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count of Monte Cristo (1846) that ‘it is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand, it is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature’. It was the unnecessary length and the repetitions that appalled him most. Yet when he tried to produce a more elegant, distilled translation, he gave up: he began to wonder if the repetitions and redundancies were a necessary part of its structure.

Right now on the website for A24 – the reigning enfant terrible of indie American film distribution – you can buy a ‘Babygirl Milk Tee’ for $40, a T-shirt prominently featuring an image of a tall glass of milk. This is an allusion to one of the more memorable moments in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl, when upstart intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson) surreptitiously purchases a glass of milk for his much-older boss, Romy (Nicole Kidman), at a work function, then watches her drink it in a single gulp; a semi-public display of psychosexual domination.