Review: Surge Is a Frenzied, Politically Charged Depiction of a Crime Spree

At a glance, Surge is about a British airport security officer, Joseph (Ben Whishaw), who in response to his drastically alienating environment snaps and goes on a crime spree. This scenario has a dubious tradition, of which Todd Phillips’s Joker is a recent but somewhat more nuanced instance, but director Aneil Karia’s handling of both the snap and spree steers the film away from the fantasy of white male grievance that it could have been.

In books or films that grapple with mental illness, there’s always a risk involved in diagnosis, which threatens to subsume a character in this or that disorder, explaining away their actions and turning them into a walking batch of symptoms. Surge sidesteps this trap, so deftly in fact that it’s hard to say if the film is as concerned with mental illness at it appears.

To begin with, Joseph’s snap is more of a crumbling, as it can’t be pinpointed in any one plot beat. The most obvious candidate, a scene in which Joseph has to pat down an older traveler who seems to recognize him, is also the slipperiest. Joseph has never met him before, can’t remember him, or won’t acknowledge any past acquaintance with him. The increasingly erratic man complains that the metal-detector wand is burning his skin, repeating “zap, zap, zap, zap,” then tells Joseph to follow him in exactly 63 seconds before making a dash for it, only for security to immediately subdue him. Even if the man doesn’t know Joseph, he suggests a comrade in psychosis, allowing Joseph to recognize some latent aberration in himself, though like a placebo it may be nothing more than a product of his imagination.

The film’s depiction of Joseph’s spree is also unusual, in that it escalates not from any desire on his part for violence or revenge, but to do a favor for his co-worker, Lily (Jasmine Jobson), by fixing her television set. The job calls for a cheap cable, but the ATM eats his bank card. He goes to the bank, but they won’t accept his bus pass as identification. He writes a note saying he has a gun, and the teller empties the register. The adrenaline of the impromptu bank robbery, combined with that of the unanticipated sex he has with Lily (in the film’s most questionable scene) sets off a chain reaction of norm-shattering behavior.

Surge’s handheld camera, which stays uncomfortably and claustrophobically close to an expressive Whishaw’s face (shades of László Nemes’s Son of Saul) can be as nauseating as it is exhilarating. Sound design augments the camerawork’s invasiveness by incorporating non-diegetic cracklings of static or ringing bells, as if we’re hearing the inside of Joseph’s head. More than effective in visualizing Joseph’s disorientated state of mind, the film’s aesthetics may leave viewers feeling like they just stepped off of a merry-go-round.

As opposed to people, Joseph revenges himself on objects, above all the sterile packaging that contains or separates one thing from another. Though it’s in some sense self-liberatory, Joseph’s spree is never presented as righteous, only inevitable—and inevitably short-lived. There are moments, though, when it takes on a ludic euphoria—in a scene, for instance, where Joseph exchanges a stack of currency for a swanky hotel room, which he then destroys in a manner at once systematic and playful, slicing apart the mattress and pillows to release fistfuls of goose down and watch it floating in the sunlight.

Relentlessly bleak in its first half, by the end Surge has turned a tonal somersault, as Joseph’s gun turns out to be a banana and the wounds he’s sustained to his face become, paradoxically, a mask of joy. The word “surge” suggests something as much political as electrical or chemical. If the film can be said to explore mental health, it does so from a perspective akin to that of R.D. Laing, who argued that insanity may be the healthy response to a dysfunctional society, whereas sickness resides in those who continue to behave as if nothing were amiss.