Waves (2019)

Waves is special because it doesn’t just tell a family drama—it makes you feel it in your bones, using sound, color, and rhythm like emotional weather rolling in. Trey Edward Shults directs with a bold, almost musical intensity, and the performances (especially Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Taylor Russell) are so raw and specific you stop watching “characters” and start recognizing people. The film moves through love, pressure, and grief with a restless, immersive energy, then finds moments of surprising tenderness that feel earned rather than sentimental. It is heavy and includes teen substance use and violence, so it’s not a casual Friday-night pick, but if you’re open to a cathartic, beautifully made experience, it’s the kind of movie that can linger for days.

Waves is aiming for a raw, immersive portrait of a family imploding under pressure and then trying to stitch itself back together, and Trey Edward Shults commits hard to that emotional gut-punch approach. The problem is it’s deliberately intense and stylistically loud, and the mid-movie narrative shift can feel like the film yanks the rug out from under you—powerful for some, frustrating or even manipulative for others. If you don’t want teen drug use, violence, and grief presented in a relentlessly heavy, sensory way, this will likely feel exhausting rather than cathartic. That said, the performances (especially Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Taylor Russell) are excellent, and when the movie quiets down, it finds moments of real tenderness that may land if you’re in the right headspace.