A lot of the films we cover on the site relate to the great ‘what if?’, the playing out of fantastical scenarios, some more realistic, many supernatural and many fairly impossible if not utterly so – but a genre we rarely get asked to cover is the disaster movie. It’s strange that so very few good disaster movies cross our paths, really, because if we’re fascinated with ‘what ifs’, then surely there’s plenty of horror and drama to derive from the ‘not ifs, whens’. This is the precise set-up for The Wave (aka Bølgen), a Norwegian-language disaster film which starts with some real-life footage of a twentieth-century rockslide which obliterated a Norwegian village called Geiranger. We’re told that this kind of rockslide will inevitably happen again in future, and that a site called the Åkernes Crevice is at especial risk of further widening, which when – not if – it does, will send a massive amount of debris into the fjord beneath, creating a tsunami likely to wipe out all of the picturesque homes on the fjord’s shores. It’s something you can’t help but bear in mind as you watch the film unfold, and whilst The Wave carries with it some tried-and-tested disaster movie plot devices, it’s already one step up in terms of engagement.
This not being The Discovery Channel however, the story of The Wave is refracted through a human interest angle – with the almost-obligatory parents/children set-up (presumably people without children lie down and accept their inevitable fates when these kinds of events happen, because they simply have no reason for living.) We meet father Kristian (Kristoffer Joner, fresh from The Revenant), wife Idun (Ane Dahl Torp) and the kids, teenage son Sondre and little sister Julia: they’re a family just about to move to a new home in a city, where the folks will be taking on new jobs. Kristian has been working for many years as a geologist, monitoring the very Åkernes Crevice we’ve already seen namechecked as being unstable, and so the fact that we see him in his last day in this role is an immediate concern (there is little more dangerous, in cinema, than one’s last day at work.) True enough, not long after the farewell speeches, Kristian notices some errant readings; he’s astute enough to register this as a real concern, but people being people, his colleagues prefer to err on the side of inaction. Having little choice, he goes back to packing up, preparatory to taking his kids onwards to their new home the following day. Idun has to work out her notice at her own job, but will join them shortly. So far, so good.
Racked with misgivings over that data he’d seen, though, Kristian bails out on catching the ferry, leaving his kids in the car (!) and heading back to his old workplace; it’s definitely worse than he thought, and through a process of agonisingly realistic scenes of people assuming that the data is wrong, or not serious, or that the whole thing will blow over, the anticipated event begins to unfold. We now have a family split in two – Kristian and Julia in one place, Idun and Sondre elsewhere – and the inevitability of a giant wave to intervene.
Given the film’s title, cover art and real-life opening footage, it’s utterly obvious what is going to happen so the whole ‘spoiler alert’ warning is surplus to requirements here; the film has opted out of any major plot surprises, made it clear this is the case, and director Roar Uthaug is no doubt therefore aware that he has to make the disaster itself bloody good. This he achieves, with sensitively-done SFX, a long, slow build-up to the cataclysmic event – almost half the film – and a pleasantly well-developed bunch of characters. Yes, I just poured scorn on the whole cookie-cutte
r family unit plot motif which seems compulsory in any disaster, but the saving grace here is that the key players act well, are likeable and (mostly) lack Hollywood sentimentalism. It’s signposted for us very early on that Idun is no shrinking violet – her hands-on repair of a minor plumbing disaster at home tells us that she’s not going to spend the whole film fretting about soft furnishings – and there’s only the tiniest touch of manufactured-feud-which-leads-to-redemptive-reunion. The supporting actors are also very good, even if you feel that some of them are really only there to be swallowed by freezing water. Though perhaps the best scenes, for me, relate not to the high action of a killer tsunami, but the moments of dread and the slower dangers related to this event. Some parts of the film are even eerie, such as when the sirens ring out across an otherwise idyllic, sleepy town to warn that there’s ten minutes until the long-anticipated wave finally hits…
All in all, The Wave handles its subject matter very well: it’s well-made, well-shot, and shows evidence of careful consideration in how best to balance high action with slow tension. As an aside, if it weren’t for that whole tsunami thing, it’d make a superb tourist board commercial for the beauties of Norway, as the long shots of the surrounding area speak for themselves. A handful of tropes certainly don’t take away from the fact that this is a decent film with moments of genuine flair. Get it and watch it soon, before Mother Nature takes some opportunity to squash us all like bugs.
The Wave is available now on DVD from Studiocanal.