Waves

WAVES   ***1/2

Trey Edward Shults

2019

IDEA:  An African-American family in southern Florida deals with the repercussions of their decisions.

BLURB:  True to the title, emotions and sensations cascade through Trey Edward Shults’ film like barreling waves, endlessly redistributing between its characters rations of grief, rage, and hope. Leaning as heavily into formalist flourishes as fervid melodrama, the director makes the film into a palpitating field of intensities, a living mood ring that makes you feel every hot, cold, devastating, and rapturous temperamental vagary in appropriately oscillating surges. What Shults is after here, and what he conveys with such affective force through this rhythmic expressionism, is how people inherit and transfer energies both positive and harmful, and particularly how this manifests within one family’s fragile ecosystem. The first part of Waves, which is orchestrated more like a bullet-paced thriller than a domestic drama, is focused primarily on the harmful energies. Plunged into the subjectivity of the obstinate, overweening Tyler, it’s a breathless flurry of 360-degree pans, booming music cues, and strobes blurring into police lights, a portrait of a young man’s downfall precipitated by a father, and by extension a culture of masculinity, that equates strength with dominance. The second half is no less immersive, even as it replaces Tyler’s blinkered male perspective with the more open, feminized one of his sister. Here, Waves ambitiously revises and redeems the tragedy that cleaves it in two, showing how the aftermath of a family trauma can, in the best case scenario, be transmuted into redemptive love and understanding. Shults’ move toward the homiletic in this part flirts with the banal, and risks awarding easy resolutions where none exist. But it’s the bone-deep performances, the naked emotionality, and the director’s visceral command of form and feeling that give Waves its sense of tidal release.