Waves review: A family drama that is all dazzle and no thought

Dir: Trey Edward Shults. Cast: Kelvin Harrison Jr, Taylor Russell, Lucas Hedges, Sterling K Brown, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Alexa Demie. 15 cert, 136 mins.

Particular care needs to be taken when white people tell black stories. Waves is a film about the rapid and shocking destruction of an upper-middle-class black family, written and directed by a white man. It shows.

Kelvin Harrison Jr is Tyler Williams, a popular high-school senior trained to be great by his overbearing father (Sterling K Brown). He is constantly working out and is expected to get the wrestling scholarship that will secure his professional future. But things soon begin to spiral out of control – he masks a potentially destructive injury with painkillers, his combative relationship with his parents threatens to combust, and his girlfriend Alexis (Alexa Demie) is late to have her period.

There is something fascinating, thrilling even, about very old-fashioned teenage melodrama playing out within an Instagram-filtered Gen-Z haze. Here, terror about an unwanted pregnancy is conveyed over iMessage, drug-induced mania occurs beneath flashing lights that may or may not be real, and every scene has the neon-soaked visual sumptuousness of an ultrasound. Director Trey Edward Shults, last responsible for the post-apocalyptic chiller It Comes at Night (2017), is a prodigiously talented visual artist, the lens of his camera endlessly twirling – around the seats in a speeding vehicle and through the jets of a sprinkler system, lending each frame the feeling of being achingly alive. As a visual feast, with a characteristically jittery score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Waves is stirring. But its dialogue and the increasingly manipulative theatrics of its narrative are disastrous.

A brutal plot twist at the film’s midpoint, which flips its point of view from Tyler to his timid younger sister Emily (Taylor Russell), exposes all of Waves’s failings. Shults reportedly wrote Waves without thinking of the colour of his protagonists, only casting black actors once Harrison Jr, of It Comes at Night, insisted he was perfect for the role of Tyler. Conversation and improvisation on set between Shults and his black players subsequently beefed up the film’s awareness of colour. As a result, there is one notable scene early on in which Tyler is told by his father that black men must work twice as hard to achieve the success typically afforded to their white neighbours. “We are not afforded the luxury of being average,” he says.

But what happens next exposes how little Shults has considered the subtextual implications of his story. The film bypasses the politics of interracial relationships, the social responses to light skin and dark skin, cultural treatment of abortion, and the relationship between black boys and the police, or black boys and the prison system.

Waves rapidly descends into a repetitive cycle of black trauma, playing horror as a kind of cruel irony. We end up knowing little about the interior lives, dreams or desires of the Williams family, while Alexis is reduced to a screeching plot device. Staggeringly, despite Emily taking centre stage in the film’s second half, it is her boyfriend, a sentient jar of mayonnaise played by Lucas Hedges, who is granted more depth, backstory and moments of grand emoting. The Williams family, meanwhile, are transformed into mere props for a problematic morality tale, or a pat story of forgiveness and grief. There are shades of Moonlight (2016) and American Honey (2016) throughout: Shults grasps for a feeling of reckless abandon and “head dangling out the window of a speeding car” joyfulness, but struggles to replicate any of their mutual depth.

It is further disappointing because there is some spectacular acting here. Brown, so magnetic in Black Panther (2018) and The People v OJ Simpson (2016), is crushingly broken throughout, sourcing the humanity in a character who has less an arc than a series of inconsistent monologues. Renee Elise Goldsberry, one of the original stars of Hamilton, is similarly brilliant as Tyler’s stepmother, all tightly coiled sadness that inevitably explodes out into the open – a mode echoed by Harrison Jr, who compellingly alternates between moody stoicism and volatility. They’re let down, however, by a film that is all dazzle and no thought.

Shults has proven himself to be a brilliant filmmaker already; his 2015 debut Krisha, in particular, is an unbearably intimate portrayal of familial and psychological trauma. But Waves gets away from him, the film far more captivated by sound and spectacle than it is character and story. There is wonder here, but it curdles into white nonsense and never recovers.