Waves Parent Guide

Tyler Williams (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) is a high school senior, a star on the school wrestling team, and happily involved with his girlfriend, Alexis (Alexa Demie). The only cloud in the sky is his overbearing father (Sterling K. Brown). That is, until Tyler suffers a serious shoulder injury which threatens to destroy his wrestling career. Using the Oxycodone prescribed for his father to manage the pain, Tyler tries to keep his injury secret, but things have already started to unravel.

This is the most agonizingly long and uninteresting movie I’ve endured in ages. Catastrophically dull for long stretches, stretched even further by indulgent shooting and inadequate editing, Waves is the first movie I’ve seen for this job that made me commit a cardinal sin: I pulled out my phone partway through the show to see how long I’d been stuck there. I tried to be discreet, but frankly, I think the people a few rows behind me were just as curious as I was.

Waves contains ripples of good storytelling, and the fundamental plot isn’t bad, but it’s swamped by dreadful directing. With two exceptions, the characters are underdeveloped and less compelling than they might otherwise be. Those two exceptions get most of the screen time, but so much of it is spent on lingering shots of next to nothing that the time feels wasted.

An “R” rating covers a lot of territory ranging from movies with three sexual expletives right on through to those with explicit sexual content. Waves manages to earn its Restricted rating on multiple fronts. In addition to prolonged profanity, the movie features extensive depictions of teenage sexuality and drug use, making it completely unsuitable for family viewing. This behavior is frequently depicted in a negative context, but sometimes the film seems strangely ambivalent about the whole business.

Beyond its content issues, the story is burdened by its own heaving mass of self-absorption, drowning in the conceit that it’s telling the most important story to grace the world of cinema. It’s hard for a talented cast to crawl out from under that kind of nonsense. Interestingly, Kelvin Harrison recently starred in a startlingly similar film: Luce: similar characters, similar challenges, and almost identical content problems. Unfortunately, this film lacks Luce’s theatrical feel. Waves feels like someone’s Instagram account got mashed up with a music video. Writing for The Globe and Mail, Sarah-Tai Black points out that this movie is essentially a “mixtape” made by a white director who’s trying to package black experiences. Sadly, in Black’s words, he “lack[s] the vision needed to sell it as the challenging formal experience” it needs to be. I’m inclined to agree with Black. Watching Waves is like watching the sea steadily retreat from the shore, with no hope that the tide is going to turn.