WAVES

Of course, I must give credit where credit is due. Harrison Jr tries his best with the material he's given, and for the most part plays moments of intense drama so well that it's easy to forget the terrible film surrounding him. Other times, however, these moments come off as hilarious. What also hurts Harrison Jr's performance is just how unbalanced everyone else is, playing their characters on much more subdued levels which, at times, makes Harrison Jr appear like he's in a completely different film. Russell brings a pain and weariness to her character as a girl forced to grow up too soon through the mistakes of others, but this is completely overtaken, for some reason, by Hedge's character arc. I'm sure there's a great performance from Russell in here, but the film goes out of its way to make sure we never find out. 'Waves' spends so much of its runtime trying to make a number of different stories important but never has the attention to give any of them a proper beginning or payoff, instead leaving them to tread water as Shults picks up another plotline.

Perhaps the reason for Shults' harebrained storytelling is because his focus is somewhere else entirely: the visuals. 'Waves' is every aesthetic blog's dream, with trendy costuming, changing aspect ratios, gorgeous light leaks, a neon colour palette and a camera that never stops moving. It's the very definition of an empty-calorie film, where gorgeous visuals are given the task of carrying the entire affair without much substance elsewhere. What makes 'Waves' so much worse than the average empty-calorie film, however, is how it thinks it is knocking both its cinematography and its storytelling out of the park, giving the film an unbearable air of pretension. Add to this the fact that Shults doesn't know when to stop moving the damn camera, and while 'Waves' has its moments of visual beauty, the concept of having too much of a good thing springs to mind (seriously, how many times does the camera need to rotate 360 degrees on a car full of teenagers just vibing?). There are exceptions to this where films are both visually stunning and narratively rich (see: Spike Jonze's 2013 drama 'Her'), but 'Waves' is not one of them. It'll be a shame to see it hailed as some sort of masterpiece simply because it's easy to dazzle audiences with some pretty visuals.

And then there's the needle drops. I'm not above a memorable movie moment punctuated by a great track selection, but 'Waves' takes this concept way too far, and it's never a good sign when a film's most memorable moments are only that way because of an audience's prior attachment to a song. One particular moment Kanye West's 'I Am A God' is actually impossible to take seriously because of the track's use.

'Waves', while certainly ambitious, is so busy trying to be a future indie classic with its camera acrobatics and needle drops that it forgets to give any impetus to care about the supposedly profound stories it's trying to tell, instead coasting on its stylistic flairs and hoping these will distract from how shallow its writing is, making the 135-minute run time incredibly laborious. By his own admission, Shults modelled his film on the two-part structure of Frank Ocean's 'Blonde', an album which is featured prominently in the film. What audiences get instead is the cinematic equivalent of putting the album on while having a cry in the shower, a deep dive into misery porn, yet 'Waves' is a far less rewarding experience than just doing the real thing yourself.