Review of Waves (2019) by Nmuldoon — 03 Dec 2019

TIFF Update #10.

Final TIFF Review.

Waves - 10/10 So the last film I saw at TIFF also just happened to be far the best film I saw at TIFF. Waves is the new film from Trey Edward Schults, who at just 29 is already on his third film, hisTIFF Update #10.

Final TIFF Review.

Waves - 10/10.

So the last film I saw at TIFF also just happened to be far the best film I saw at TIFF. Waves is the new film from Trey Edward Schults, who at just 29 is already on his third film, his previous works ‘Krisha’ and ‘It Comes At Night’, had style to spare and formal invention but only began to hint at the talent of this young filmmaker. Waves, then, is not just the culmination of everything that Schults has done before but also feels like a genuine changing of the guard moment, the emergence of a wave of millenial filmmakers finding a new way to tell old stories. It’s easy enough to describe the story of Waves, two dovetailing coming-of-age stories about members of the same family and their experiences with love and societal pressures - but it’s a whole nother thing to describe the experience of Waves. Schults film bursts with an propulsive cinematic energy unlike anything I’ve seen, his camera almost never stops moving, the film’s excellent soundtrack echoes the visual rhythms of the film and the character’s emotions, and Schults almost always plays with light and color to highten emotion. It often feels at times like you’re watching a new style of filmmaking one by a generation of filmmakers who grew up with an entirely different way of consuming media and has funneled that into their creative vision. I spent much of this film watching as it unfolds frequently just in awe of the montage of image and sound in front of me.

The acting in the film is uniformly excellent, but Kelvin Harrison Jr who also worked with Schults previously gives an absolutely unforgettable performance. This is an actor who can communicate unannounced pain and anger with a simple glance, his face often having to be the canvas for the film’s emotions during his segments many wordless passages. This is a beautiful humanist portrait of life, a call for empathy during a time when our society seems at it’s most callous. Waves is a film not just aiming for one of the best of the year, but one of the best of the decade.