The Wave

La Ola is far from perfect, often losing sight of its broader ideas for less well-executed narrative beats that don’t always cohere, but it still finds a tune where it counts.

The Wave is nothing if not ambitious, and in its bittersweet ending it reaches a melancholic, nuanced understanding that once the feminist wave broke, the backlash began. But the kind of complex debates about consent, vigilante justice and empowerment that are deployed here sit uneasily in what is in some ways a classical female self-realisation musical.

Aesthetic flourishes abound, which make it an entertaining viewing experience, but one does wish that the narrative was a touch more complex. Lelio embeds some compelling meta-textual moments — ones that mostly address that fact that he’s a man tackling this subject — but the actual story of Julia can feel secondary to the melodic pageantry.

Even at its most formally playful, the film is marked by an earnestness of tone that makes it feel like work, especially given a two-hour-plus runtime that exposes the repetitiveness of its rhetoric and the sparseness of its drama.

Even at its most formally playful, the film is marked by an earnestness of tone that makes it feel like work, especially given a two-hour-plus runtime that exposes the repetitiveness of its rhetoric and the sparseness of its drama.