Plinth

Indestructability is a feeling encouraged by Tyler’s high school wrestling coach, who makes the team chant in unison before a meet: ‘I cannot be taken down! I am a new machine.’ And in that moment, Tyler looks like one. He’s popular, handsome — his dyed hair seems inspired by the cover of Frank Ocean’s Blonde. He has bright college prospects, and a girlfriend with whom he’s completely infatuated. The camera is ceaselessly on the move, swirling and panning; charged, as if by Tyler’s own upward trajectory.

The only trouble is Chekhov and his proverbial gun. When a character says early on in a film that they can’t be taken down, you can safely bet they will be.

And Tyler is not as unbreakable as he first appears; he suffers in secret from a shoulder tear. A doctor tells him that it needs immediate surgery, which is not what someone banking on wrestling to get them into college wants to hear. So Tyler pretends he didn’t. Instead, he starts stealing his dad Ronald’s Oxycodone to fight through the pain.

Ronald, meanwhile, keeps stacking weight on Tyler’s shoulders — (literally: they lift together, flexing and groaning in front of a large mirror.) ‘We are not afforded the luxury of being average,’ Ronald says, explaining that black people have to work ten times as hard, swimming upstream in a white world. For Tyler, like his father, keeping his head above water means doubling down. Tragically, denial and overextension will prove to be his undoing.

Waves is difficult to describe. Protean, in its feel and form. As much as it follows a linear plot, unfolding the coming-of-age stories of Tyler and his sister Emily in diptych, Waves spends just as much energy on a kind of anti-narrative mood-conjuring. The ambient camera work is reminiscent of Terrence Malick (director Trey Edward Shults is one of Malick’s former crew-members). Lyric touches and details, even in the film’s colour palette, will likely draw comparisons to Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (another coming-of-age story also set in South Florida). Then, the amount of time characters spend in cars – and the prominence of Waves’ soundtrack – make it feel almost like a road movie.

Just as the camera revolves, so events spiral. Each swoop in on Tyler’s face, straining against a sweaty chinlock, a brush closer to calamity. Testosterone turns to temper turns to tragedy, and the ripple of micro-events — a tear in the muscle, a text message — compound their pile up. The wave, poised to crash down on Tyler, his family, and the wider community, in painful suspension. The persistent use of mid-close up shots, creating a sense of closeness and intimacy, come to feel claustrophobic. That being said, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when; the way that mood subsides into plot and vice versa, reminiscent of that John Lennon line: ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.’

As for lyricism and colour, even the sky is intoxicating – constantly aglow with washed out teals and pinks. As light falls, Alexis’ Day-Glo orange nails evoke brightness and promise as she caresses Tyler’s bleached hair; two young lovers, interlocked in the sultry indigo of the sea. Notice how the red light from an MRI machine forms a cross on Tyler’s head — the sight of a gun, or the crucifixion — as he slides into the tube. Again, without your noticing, the rate at which reds and blues appear in the palette gradually increases. A state of emergency, on the march.

Music, too, is key — just as it is for Tyler, with his Life of Pablo poster hanging prominently in his bedroom. Clearing songs from the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, and Frank Ocean is no mean feat for an indie movie with a limited budget — yet these songs seem integral to the film’s overall effect. Notably, and the closest Waves comes to breaking into musical, is Tyler rapping along to Lamar’s ‘Backseat Freestyle’, as flames roar in a fire pit on the beach: the lurid sexism of the lyrics (‘pray my dick get big as the Eiffel Tower / so I can fuck the world for seventy-two hours’) seems to provide a kind of cathartic grammar for Tyler’s frustration and aggression. It’s one that threatens to buckle, as Tyler’s misogyny and anger seem less and less able to be contained. A particularly pivotal moment is accompanied by Kanye West’s ‘I am a God’, and Tyler seems propelled forward by its jagged synths; baffled by its warped screams. He’s running on the fumes of West’s bravado, and his repeated edict: I am a God. This song lets us right inside Tyler’s head, as it grants him passage into his idol’s.

Remember what it was like to feel so untouchable. Remember the first time you fell in love. Remember the first time your life, all of a sudden, got serious. Wasn’t it all the more painful because you didn’t see it coming? Remember that summer. Remember what songs you were listening to that helped you muddle through. Waves is the story of a family searching for love and support and for ways to get back in the driving seat. It rolls around your head, long after its final surge.

By Sammi Gale