Waves focuses on a time before and after a turning point for a Floridian suburban family. It stars Kelvin Harrison Jr., who is unrecognizable after being the titular character in Luce and appears to be the director’s muse, as the elder child, the son and the star of the family, and Taylor Russell, who recently caught my attention in Escape Room, as the younger child and daughter who is almost entirely in the background of a family dominated by sports, work and other bombastic markers of achievement. It also has Sterling K. Brown of This Is Us and Black Panther as the lead supporting actor, and he plays their father.

I was extremely reluctant to see Waves because Trey Edward Shults directed it, and I despised his second film, It Comes At Night, but I did not want to rule out this film because it did seem to belong in a different genre, the (mostly black) cast is amazing, and the preview was visually arresting and vibrantly colorful so I decided to give him a reluctant second chance. I decided to see it in theaters, but unfortunately not at matinee prices. The good news is that it is better than It Comes At Night.

The bad news is that just because Waves tells a story that deserves to be told, it does not mean that I wanted to see that story. It is filled with aspects of life before the sensational bits that I did my best to avoid when I was that age so the idea of voluntarily giving up my time at this late stage in life immersed in that recognizable world, which I never liked, made me wish that I never saw the movie. It is two hours sixteen minutes long and is divided into two parts. I preferred the second part over the first. Even though the first was necessary for the second part to resonate, because the film is top heavy, and I was less invested in what I thought was the predictable first part, I was less locked into the film than I should have been if the entire film captured me. (It was like watching Interstellar again-I knew the plot in the first five minutes and resented that it took so long to get where I wanted to go.) Waves felt like a high definition Terrence Malick film and call me a philistine, but Malick’s filmmaking does not suit my tastes. Shults’ vibrant color palette in this film is ripped from the art of James Turrell, who is one of my favorites.

I enjoy a balance of brilliant dialogue, powerful acting and a distinctive vision as exhibited in Mickey and the Bear. Waves is like the anti-Mickey and the Bear because while the acting is brilliant, the dialogue is realistic but missing that quotidian poetry mixed with realism. When something is briefly referenced, it feels complete without need for elaboration, less predictably sensational then when something shocking happens, it is understated. Shults practically takes a highlighter and screams foreboding or important when it needs to elaborate on one point or pull back on another. It is verging on a narrative straight from a soap opera or an afterschool special. The only thing that separates Waves from lower art is the visual, but the majority of the camera work is so obtrusive that I did not enjoy the first part. It is not that I want to forget that I am watching a movie. I want to forget to think because I am too busy feeling. Take your Dramamine because Shults plops his camera on a Lazy Susan for the majority of the first part and goes wild. I get it! The camera movement reflects the emotional state of that part’s protagonist so the viewer can relate to that person and step into another’s shoes, but just because I theoretically empathize with a character does not automatically mean that I can relate to that person. I will never forget when a person said that the pauses and breaths are just as important if not more so than the action. The first part is an action film filled with emotions over well- choreographed fight scenes, but it leans towards chaos cinema, not Fred Astaire, which leaves me cold.

Shults is braver in Waves than he was in It Comes At Night by not giving in to the marketing ploy of feigning as if this film belonged to a more lucrative genre that it does. It is an artsy fartsy movie and never deliberately aims for the young adult market. I applaud that he is working his way through finding an American cinematic way to convey grief and loss even if he has not consistently succeeded like French films. His second part, particularly the sequence right before the end, almost makes even the parts that I disliked worth it. He makes convincing parallels between love, acceptance and forgiveness without diminishing consequences. Still I do not think that his effort to humanize his characters at their nadir is necessarily as countercultural as he would hope that he is because real life parallels often indicate that the sympathy of the narrative usually rests with the bad actor in many cases.  Maybe that is why it is so important to make the main characters black so the story does not have to include the real life impulse of other characters’ desire to diminish the impact of acts when viewers are more likely to understand and excuse than condemn and punish.

In a film filled with bad decisions, perhaps the best bad decision featured in Waves is eating while taking a bath. Just the sheer alliteration of burgers and bath beg for it to become a thing if it is not already, and I am just woefully behind. Also applause to having a calico long-haired cat in the film. My favorite character in the entire film is Security Guard Heim played by David Anthony Payton. I want him to be the protagonist of his own film and would definitely brunch with him. I appreciate that the son’s friends saw Hereditary and were not going to let their buddy accidentally go out like that so they were jackasses, but considerate and generally nice. I thought the Christian elements worked. Caution to casting directors: I do not think that it is possible to dislike or disapprove of any character played by Brown so if you were trying to make me frustrated with the dad, it totally did not work. Harrison is a fearless actor who is making some incredibly artistic brave choices even if I was repulsed by his character. I feel as if he is already living his best post-racial life while fully acknowledging and embracing his blackness. Still Russell managed to once again tuck the movie under her arm and just quietly walk away with the entire movie, which is why the second half is my favorite.

I liked Waves enough to take Shults off my shit list and add Krisha, his first film, to my queue, but not enough to be a fan who would drop everything and rush to the theater when his next movie drops. It will depend on the cast and the story. I think that it is best seen on the big screen because it is the only way that you can stop yourself from stopping or wandering off if you hate the first part as much as I did. If you are not into artsy fartsy films, run the other way.