In classical Hollywood cinema, most movies rush forward, like a river or roller coaster, along a steady course toward a certain objective.
Not so Trey Edward Shults’ brilliant, audacious third feature, “Waves,” whose enigmatic title suggests how its visionary young writer-director sets out to challenge our ideas of how and why things happen in life.Set in South Florida — not so far from the microcosm Barry Jenkins illuminated in “Moonlight,” though a world apart in terms of social class and opportunity — “Waves” bends and surprises, radiates and engulfs, in a dizzying and ecstatic attempt to capture the love and pain and pressure visited upon a contemporary American family — an African American family, to be precise.
For Shults, who is white, doing justice to that experience means projecting beyond himself to capture all that is universal and unique about his four central characters, each of whom feels fully dimensional by the end of this intimate epic.
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