Review: Waves

Waves (15)

USA 2019  136 mins  Dir: Trey Edward Shults  Cast: Taylor Russell, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Alexa Demie, Lukas Hedges, Sterling K. Brown

If It Comes at Night director Trey Edward Shults had set himself the challenge of making a movie that’s virtually impossible to review without spoilers, he could hardly have done better than Waves. But let’s give it a go. This is a film of two equally proportioned yet wildly contrasting halves. The less you know about the incident that occasions that abrupt mid-point tonal shift, and what comes afterwards, the better. Whether you’re prepared to go with it is another matter.

The film hits the ground running with a blissful, immersive and kinetic opening sequence featuring high school lovers Tyler (It Comes at Night‘s Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie) as they cruise down a sunny Florida freeway in his car. This also features Shults’ signature shot, in which his camera spins through 360 degrees and the skilful sound design places us at its axis. He will return to this dizzying effect several times in very different circumstances.

Tyler, it transpires, is a high-school wrestler from a prosperous, middle-class family who’s driven to succeed at school, with a relentless barrage of cheesy motivational slogans making clear that failure is not an option, and by his taskmaster father (Brown) – the very embodiment of ‘tough love’ – who works out with him in their home gym and asserts: “The world doesn’t give a shit about you and me. We are not afforded the luxury of being average.” No pressure, then. Trouble is that Tyler has sustained a career-ending injury and is instructed by his doctor not to grapple again. His life soon begins to spiral out of control, partly through circumstances not of his making and partly through poor decisions on his part. Shults conjures up an atmosphere of mounting dread as the tension mounts, ably underlined by the Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross score and Kelvin Harrison Jr’s finely calibrated performance.

The shocking break point is expertly handled as the frame shrinks from expansive widescreen to suitably boxed-in Academy ratio as the world draws in on Tyler. Then Waves pivots to a character who had only a minor role in the preceding drama and a very different love story is played out. It’s redemptive arc is nicely played by Taylor Russell and Lukas Hedges, but this feels very much like the lesser part of the diptych, leading to what you might be forgiven for interpreting as a conservative big hug of a moral about the importance of family, with a dash of god-bothering. Perhaps more importantly, having involved us so intensely in Tyler’s story, the absence of a resolution is highly frustrating. There’s much to admire here, from Shults’ elan as a cinematic sensualist to the careful way in which he acknowledges the racial aspects of his story but declines to make this the central defining issue. But it’s the first half that will stay with you.