The production company A24 has made a name for itself by picking up and producing some of the strongest independent offerings in cinema, including 2015’s sci-fi cult hit Ex Machina and Room, which nabbed an Oscar for Brie Larson’s performance the same year.
Waves, released quietly late last year, is now available to stream on Amazon Prime. It continues A24’s legacy of putting out some of the most moving independent films on the market.
The film tells the story of a family living a modern suburban life in South Florida. It initially focuses on Tyler, played by the 25-year-old Kelvin Harrison Jr., who, between this film and last year’s Luce, is becoming a staple in indie breakout movies.
Tyler is an ambitious high schooler driven to succeed by his domineering father, Ronald (portrayed by Emmy winner Sterling Brown). He’s a star athlete who sees himself as invincible.
He spends his nights in the wrestling ring and his days at the beach with his devoted girlfriend, Alexis. His mother, Catharine (Renee Goldsberry), and sister, Emily (Taylor Russell), love and respect him, and after seeing the family’s palatial upper-middle-class house, it’s easy to assume that this is a story about people who have made it and are living the good life.
But behind the glamour of writer-director Trey Shults’s cinematography — the film’s sweeping shots are reminiscent of Terrence Malick, for whom the millennial Shults once interned — we start to sense that the feeling of triumph that permeates Tyler’s life cannot last.
Ronald, a self-made man who grew up black and working class in the South, cautions Tyler that he can’t ever afford to slack off. His advice will sound familiar to those of us whose parents came from meager backgrounds but who were able to give us childhoods they could never have dreamed of. “We are not afforded the luxury of being average,” Ronald tells his son. “Got to work 10 times as hard just to get anywhere. Listen, I don’t push you because I want to. I push you because I have to.”
Ronald’s well-meaning but overbearing parenting exacerbates Tyler’s stress. We see him straining himself in increasingly unhealthy ways. He continues to compete in wrestling even after his doctor tells him that the sport is harming his body. When his relationship with Alexis takes a more fractious turn, he’s unable to cope. Eventually, these stresses lead to a tragedy that changes the family’s trajectory.
Without giving anything away, it is sufficient to say that this event shifts the tone and direction of the film, forcing the family to deal with an unprecedented event and the family’s role in creating it.
“I’m the one who’s trying to hold this family together,” says Ronald, defending his choices.
“You pushed him!” protests Catharine.
At this point, Shults carefully shifts the focus of the plot away from Tyler and toward Emily, a turn that allows us to see inside the mind of a character who, for the first half of the film, has resided in the background.
Emily struggles to deal with the stress of the family’s crisis, which is only compounded by stigma that comes from the surrounding community. But she finds solace in Luke, a boy at her high school who offers her comfort and sympathy at a time when many others treat her like an outcast.
They eventually become a couple and fall deeply in love, the second such relationship we see play out across cultural lines in the film — Luke is white, with a father who lives in Missouri.
These relationships are the foundation of Waves’s message. As the trials and turmoil of life bear down on us like waves in a stormy ocean, we are kept afloat by our ties to loved ones.
What Shults has created here is a film that recognizes the nuance and depth of the human experience. Unlike many movies, which present us with cookie-cutter villains and heroes, Waves challenges us to look at Tyler and his family as flawed but sympathetic characters navigating a world that can force any of us to be either heroic or villainous.
We see that depth in a scene between Ronald and Emily in the latter half of the film, in which Ronald finally drops his pride and cries, confessing that he doesn’t have anyone else to talk to. Emily quickly reassures him and tells him she’s happy he’s able to talk to her about the family’s problems. But when she expresses anger at her brother for throwing the family into turmoil, Ronald is able to regain his role as the supportive father. “He’s not evil. He’s just a human being,” he reminds her.
That’s a lesson the film gives us over and over again as characters hurt each other and then find it within themselves to seek compassion and embrace forgiveness.
It’s remarkable that Waves was snubbed during awards season, winning only a few titles in minor competitions. One reviewer at the London newspaper the Times suggested that this may have been because “something about the marketing optics (a white filmmaker from Texas directs a quintessentially black movie) didn’t play well.”
If true, that would be a shame, as the film is a Molotov cocktail in the face of essentialism and the idea that racial categorizations define our lives. The message of Waves is universal, not limited by the color of its cast or crew.
Zaid Jilani is a Bridging Differences writing fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and a freelance journalist.
