Emotions break in inventive ‘Waves’

Director Trey Edward Shults plunges us into a family drama in which style surpasses story..

From its opening shots, it's clear that Waves -- a movie about the difficulties faced by a middle-class black family -- refuses to be ordinary. Director Trey Edward Shults creates an illusion in which it feels as if the movie's images are enveloping us. A simple shot of a girl riding a bicycle pushes us into a world that surrounds us and begins to work its ways on us, jarring us out of indifference.

Shults (Krisha) takes a dare with his movie. First, he bets that a white director can capture black life in South Florida without dipping into the treacherous waters of cultural appropriation. Second, he divides his movie into halves -- focusing first on the family's son, a championship wrestler played by Kelvin Harrison Jr. In the second half, Shults draws attention to Emily (Taylor Russell), the family's daughter.

The pace and concerns of the movie's two halves are radically opposed. Initially, Shults barrels his way through the story of Harrison's Tyler, a high-school wrestler whose future looks so promising, we can't help but think that the rug will be pulled out from under him. We wait for tragedy and it eventually arrives with shocking force.

The second half of the movie deals with how Tyler's sister adjusts after the devastations of the first half. The movie proceeds to draw a slightly different picture of the family's father (Sterling K. Brown), the owner of a construction company who pushes his son hard in the first half and who softens with his daughter in the movie's final chapter. We also gain new insight into the family's mother (Renee Elise Goldsberry).

Shults keeps the movie's emotional life close to the surface as he pushes into the teen world Tyler occupies. The first indication that Tyler may be headed for trouble occurs when he injures his shoulder. He doesn't tell his hard-driving father. He begins swiping pain pills that his father uses for a bum knee.

Tyler's father insists that his son perform: "We can't afford the luxury of being average," he says. "We have to work 10 times as hard as others."

It's one of the ways in which race becomes part of the movie's fabric, a realization that ordinary striving isn’t good enough for black achievers. Over-drive becomes a necessity.

Somewhat predictably, the kid who couldn't possibly fail becomes mired in drugs and alcohol. He also breaks up with his girlfriend (Alexa Demie) when he learns that she's pregnant. She refuses to get an abortion. Tyler begins to see his golden future circling a drain.

In the film's second half, Emily meets a boy (Lucas Hedges) who brings her out of her shell. I'm not sure the relationship really computes, but it forces Emily to extend herself, to begin to see beyond the borders of the world in which she was raised.

Hedges' Luke has father problems of his own and the script (unwisely, I think) branches out to include them.

Shults knows how to italicize the emotions in a scene and as a visual stylist, he immerses us in whatever location his camera finds.

I know people who question whether a white director should have made this movie, even one that brims with cinematic invention. A shot in which the camera revolves around a couple in a moving car is dizzying, as is much of the rest of the movie.

The two leads -- Harrison Jr. and Russell -- totally commit to Shults' approach, but I can't say that I totally bought Shults’s movie. When you step back from it and consider the story, Waves looks an awful lot like a conventional melodrama. I leave it to others to judge whether Shults' grasp of a black milieu is credible. He was smart to set his story in an integrated high school environment and that helps him.

Still, I wondered whether Shults wasn't guilty of piling woe on his characters.

Heaven forbid Tyler should have admired his father and had sense enough not to get his girlfriend pregnant. Suppose he had gone to college followed by medical school — all the time negotiating the tensions of being black and successful in a country that hasn’t fully faced its racist past, much less its present.

And what if Emily’s foray out of her grief and confusion arrived when she met a young black man who reached out to her? Or maybe a black female classmate?

But, hey, I’m just thinking out loud about a movie that I found visually exciting, disorienting and a bit troubling — all at the same time. Let me put it another way: I was caught up in the movie but when I reflected back on it, I thought more about Shults' vision than I did about the characters. I'm not sure that's a good thing.

A family fights for survival

It Comes at Night serves up a slice of narrowly focused, end-of-the-world horror -- minus a ton of gore.

Sometimes a movie benefits from a willingness not to be specific about something that, on its face, seems of paramount importance.

Director Trey Edward Shults (Krisha) bravely refuses to define the threat that endangers his characters in It Comes at Night. That bit of restraint determines almost everything else about his movie -- both in terms of its strengths and weaknesses.

All we know is that something unseen and mysterious has caused people to contract a highly contagious disease that inflicts terrible suffering and always proves fatal.

Faced with this mass contagion, Dad (Joel Edgerton), Mom (Carmen Ejogo) and their 17-year-old son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) have withdrawn to an isolated cabin in a woods. They've sealed their home which features a corridor leading to a red door, the only way in or out.

Set in the midst of what appears to be an end-of-the-world scenario, It Comes at Night makes wise use of its limitations, focusing on how people respond to a situation that's fraught with fear and peril.

The family does its best to protect itself from danger. When family members leave their cabin, gas masks give them an ominous, alien look. Inside, they try to keep their environment as impenetrable as possible.

Early on, the family confronts an intruder (Christopher Abbott). As it turns out, Abbott's character also has a family. He offers to share food in return for shelter and water. After plenty of initial doubts, Edgerton's Paul agrees to join forces with a new family, which also includes a wife (Riley Keough) and a child (Griffin Robert Faulkner). None of them has yet to contract the sickness.

Harrison gives the film's best performance, ably reflecting the disoriented quality that accompanies what seems to have been the family's sudden retreat from everyday life, as well as the gloomy acknowledgment that the future must be bleak.

It doesn't help that Travis also is haunted by what he sees in the movie's opening scene, the mercy killing of the family's grandfather (David Pendelton), an early victim of the unidentified "sickness," a malady that causes those who suffer to breathe unevenly and break out in festering sores.

For all its virtues, It Comes at Night also makes us realize that this kind of concentrated, hot-house approach to filmmaking can hamper the way characters are deepened or a film's themes are enriched.

Still, most of the performances click. Behind a thick beard, Edgerton does pared-down work in his second interracial relationship movie since Loving, and Abbott conveys an understanding of the harrowing difficulties involved in negotiating an impossible situation. The script shortchanges Ejogo, as well as any potential racial issues.

If there's real horror here, it has less to do with jolts and gore than with the realization that under extreme conditions, mistrust can become an essential, if double-edged, survival tool. That's a truly scary idea -- and one that seems to fit the precarious moment in which we currently find ourselves.

Bad mix: Thanksgiving, alcohol

A domestic drama that's styled to be edgy

Director Trey Edward Shults treads a familiar dramatic path in Krisha, an edgy drama about a dysfunctional family that gathers for Thanksgiving. To his credit, Shults travels this familiar arc in a style that proves unsettling from start to finish.

Shults's tipsy camera and reliance on a disturbing stream of music enhance a story in which the title character -- a recovering alcoholic -- visits her family after a long and presumably estranged absence.

From the beginning, Krisha (Krisha Fairchild) teeters on the edge of collapse. Krisha's face still shows traces of youthful beauty, but years of abuse have made it slack.

Krisha's family, including a disaffected son (played by Shults) greets her warmly but warily. She's the ticking time-bomb that's bound to explode before the holiday is done.

In her room, Krisha opens a locked box that contains her stock of pharmaceuticals, and the movie's first shot (an intense close-up of Krisha's ravaged face) underscores a feeling that something monstrous looms.

Fairchild - who in real-life is Shults's aunt -- gives an elusive performance that evade's quick categorization. Krisha's riven by contradiction: She's sincerely interested in reconnecting with her family. At the same time, she seems destined to find ways to make real reconciliation impossible.

Robyn Fairchild (Shults's mother) plays Krisha's sister Robyn; she and her husband -- a doctor played by Chris Doubek -- become background characters, as does almost everyone else in the film, including a group of young people who may be relatives or friends. Everyone assembles in a spacious Texas home that, in reality, beings to Shults's parents.

Aside from Krisha, the movie's most vividly drawn character is Doyle (Bill Wise), a man who establishes an outsiders' kinship with Krisha, but who also retains a judgmental edge. Krisha's attempts to re-establish a relationship with her son prove futile. A victim of years of neglect, he's too wounded to bury his resentments.

Shults has worked with Terrence Malick, and the master's influence becomes apparent. Shults isn't much interested in expository dialogue or explanation; he tries to set his movie in the indigestible present as he builds toward a scene of devastating emotional carnage.

After you sort through the stylistic flourishes (at times, Shults even shifts aspect ratios), Krisha becomes a fairly conventional drama that's trying as hard as it can to ratchet up tension and anxiety. Shults's movie has its searing moments, and the performances are marked by vivid authenticity.

Like a drunk who leans in too close, you may sometimes find yourself wishing Krisha would get out of your face. Maybe that's how a drama such as this has to work. Whatever you think about Krisha, Shults can't be accused of pulling his punches.