Waves (2019)
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Waves Movie Review
Waves is a 2019 drama film directed by Trey Edward Shults and starring Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Lucas Hedges. It’s such an annoying flick.
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“You have so much love to share
with the world and so much life yet to live“
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It follows an emotional journey of a suburban African American family as they navigate love, forgiveness and coming together in the wake of a tragic loss. This is such a problematic story. Yes, it has some moving moments for sure, but the movie is basically tragedy porn as it piles a tragic event after a sad development throughout its runtime, thus very unpleasantly reminding of that trash movie ‘Crash’.
Kelvin Harrison Jr. is pretty good in the main role and actually stupendous at emotional delivery in particular. Lucas Hedges is also solid, but this is one of his less interesting roles. Others are all uniformly good as the acting is strong in this one, but the characters themselves are so weak, stereotypical and the movie seemingly wallows in their pain and suffering which personally rubbed me the wrong way.
Everything that is wrong with Waves can and should be attributed to Trey Edward Shults. Yes, his direction here is truly awful as this might be the worst directed film of the year. What he chose to do with this material is very bad and offensive in a way as it lacks nuance whatsoever and treats the important issues of grief and unwanted pregnancies in a surprisingly aggressive, very off-putting manner by having some very lingering shots and takes of the violence itself.
Yes, the cinematography is good, and the film looks and sounds good throughout. I also really liked its aspect ratio and how it changes to accommodate the protagonist’s emotional flux, but simply the directing here ruined everything, and a different director would have made something genuinely heartbreaking or even profound with this story, but this one relegated it to very on-the-nose scene transitions, and simply its exceedingly angry tone frustrated me to no end.
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Waves is very well acted across the board. It’s well shot too with a very interesting change in aspect ratio to accommodate the protagonist’s emotional flux. But, Trey Edward Shults hurtled the film in such a frustratingly aggressive, exceedingly angry and downright offensive manner, which led to the movie feeling very much like tragedy porn. It unpleasantly reminded me of that trash Best Picture winner that is ‘Crash’.
