Waves, directed by Trey Edward Shults, opens in a fury: a rush of impressions and emotions. Tyler (Kelvin Harrison, Jr., also the star of this year’s Luce) is a star wrestler from Miami. He’s in love with a girl named Alexis (Alexa Demie), a fellow senior. He’s got a father, Ronald (Sterling K. Brown), who loves him as much as he pushes him: the men work out and train together, and in the evenings, after his matches, Tyler is subject to extra lessons from Dad about what went wrong. His mother died of an overdose when he was young, but he and his sister Emily (Taylor Russell) have known their stepmother, Catherine (Renée Elise Goldsberry), for too long to have ever felt motherless.
Tyler’s got a bad pain in his shoulder, worse than what he’s been telling his family—a sports injury that needs immediate surgery. That bodes poorly for Tyler finishing his season, even as the injury itself might end his career. How does he manage? How do you think?
Waves is a movie full of echoes and pronounced symmetries, particularly between men. And so it is no coincidence that Tyler’s father has a sports injury, too: a bad knee, and a supply of Oxycodone to care for it. Ronald has lately noticed a few pills missing, but you know how this story goes. If he’s aware of Tyler’s addiction, he hasn’t yet learned how to acknowledge it.
What’s immediately striking is how much of this detail spills out in Waves’s opening few minutes, in scenes that barely amount to scenes. It’s all captured by a camera that spins and pans in circles, giving us images that evoke entire experiences—a visual world dizzy with sense-memory, music, color. That’s the rush of youth you’re feeling as we whip between two young lovers going wild to Animal Collective. When the screen is awash in flashing reds and blues, you’re right to feel fear; you’re right to sense the obvious portent.
That’s because, like Shults’s two previous features—Krisha (2015) and It Comes At Night (2017)—Waves is aggressively meaningful. It’s also, for the most part, admirably sensational: unafraid to be loud, eager to impress itself upon us from the very opening shot, which is as disorienting as it is virtuosic. This feels strange to say for a movie whose ingredients have been plucked from an after-school catalogue of youth trauma and conflict—drug abuse, toxic masculinity, domestic violence, teen pregnancy, and on and on. But that fact is only a detriment for a movie that doesn’t know how to sculpt art out of such dogged material.
Waves, though, winds up being a mixed case: a fascinatingly grand attempt to spin an intergenerational tale of masculinity’s pains and paradoxes, yet one that looms so largely and loudly over its story that the rough nuances keep tilting into cliched vaguery. The film is broken into two parts, and there’s already been chatter about which is the finer half. The first focuses on Tyler, up until an incident that cracks the family open; the second, on his sister Emily and her budding romance with Tyler’s former teammate, Luke (Lucas Hedges), who’s as awkward as he is nice, and whose father is dying of cancer.
Again, echoes: both halves are anchored in fathers and sons. Each questions and challenges the transference of masculinity; each basks in mens’ vulnerability relative to the women in their lives. Those echoes occasionally feel like problems when you look too closely—there’s something about the ways Shults codes Tyler’s colorful violence versus Luke’s blank vulnerability. The likely-unintentional racial consequences of that comparison didn’t sit well with me.
But the film is also sensitive enough that while watching it, I thought more than once of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight—which, like Waves, is set in Miami, and is similarly focused on a complicated black family. They’re both A24 releases and, maybe relatedly, seem to speak the same language: both are filled with images that evoke the restless flow of their coastal setting.
Waves sets itself apart from Jenkins’s film by being a movie full of cell phones, Instagram feeds, and selfies posted online with captions like “evening flex. stay blessed fam.” Its visual world is more pointedly drawn from the lives of the people it depicts. Someone could easily write the film off for its emphatic montages and heavy music cues—Kanye West’s “I Am a God” when Tyler loses it; Radiohead’s “True Love Waits” at precisely the moment a film like this would cue up “True Love Waits.” But at its best, Shults’s style evokes an era in which apps like Vine and TikTok have reformatted the ways we make and preserve memories—an era in which providing the soundtrack to your own life is now a basic part of making one’s way in the world.
There’s as much cliche in that idea as there is in film’s main drama, but Shults also uses it effectively. Waves is a movie full of strong observations, one more than adept at bringing minor chords and colors to life. Just note the care and skill with which Tyler is dealt the blow that ruins his shoulder, a scene that so convincingly reduces Tyler to his acute pain that I could practically feel my own shoulder aching. Shults’s skill is most ample in moments like this—moments when his films’ psychological attitudes become physical.
But the purpose of the fine-grained emotional details keeps getting scrubbed out of Waves as its runtime wears on and reconciliation feels increasingly imminent. The observations are sharp, but the attitudes and arcs that they paint feel overly simple. It almost hurts the movie that the surpassing sense of visual detail in Shults’s movies, and his repeated focus on familial intimacy, tend to make you think that his characters’ inner lives have become manifest in their outer worlds. Because the scripts have belied this richness. I’ve increasingly felt a gap between the substance of Shult’s work and its style. It’s never the same as it was in the last movie, but it’s also never elevated his scripts enough for one to easily overlook how soft the conclusions Shults makes about his characters usually are. Even toward the end of Waves, entire sequences of great complexity—a visit to a prison, for example—are smoothed over with music and attractive images. What’s the point of that?
It goes without saying that a movie like this benefits from strong acting, and the performances here are uniformly exciting. Harrison has deservingly gotten plaudits so far, for a performance that nails every mark in Shults’s script without becoming a cartoon. Brown and Goldsberry, meanwhile, could have been in their own movie: theirs is a portrait of marriage with no clear conclusion, an open question mark amid so much resolution.
But it’s Russell, I think, who gives the movie’s great performance—a mix of sensitivity and awareness that make her expressions and reactions feel unsettled and hard to predict. She stands out for the attractive sense of possibility she brings to the movie. What wasn’t clear, in the end, was whether the film itself had earned that.
