The Wave
From its thunderous opening number, The Wave (La ola) makes no attempt to ease the viewer in gently. Sebastián Lelio’s hard-hitting musical drama hurls its audience straight into a charged demonstration in the courtyard of the University of Chile. The film wears its physicality on its sleeve – performance is protest and every movement is a demand for change. Dancers stamp and whirl through concrete stairwells with barely contained ferocity; chants bleed into songs, and songs into moments of collective catharsis.
At the heart of it all is Julia (Daniela López), a second-year music student who finds herself unexpectedly swept to the forefront of a surging feminist revolt. Lelio’s camera gives the performers space to move – and to falter. Working with choreographer Ryan Heffington, he imbues even stillness with a kind of latent energy. Julia’s steps often slip, and the ensemble occasionally falls into disarray, as the choreography deliberately resists perfection – it bruises, breathes and bursts with contradiction. Bodies are not merely instruments here: every heavy stomp echoes with the weight of silenced anger and every raised voice feels capable of splintering the very walls of the institution.
The setting – the university’s Department of the Arts – is fertile ground for the film’s central concerns: the merging of form and message, aesthetics and political urgency. Performances erupt in corridors, classrooms and fragments of memory – sometimes jarring, sometimes kinetic. The result feels less like a polished musical than a staged uprising. Yet Lelio is acutely aware of the uneven ground on which such movements take place. Julia’s scholarship and part-time job as a cashier in her mother’s corner shop underscore the class divides running beneath the banners and chants – a quiet reminder that activism, too, is a privilege not equally shared.
Musically, the numbers may be underwhelming, but their power lies elsewhere – less in melody than in message. And even as the script occasionally buckles under the weight of its many themes and competing voices, The Wave holds fast to its core conviction: that the body, the breath and the voice are political instruments – and using them is, in itself, an act of resistance.
Christina Yang
The Wave does not have a release date yet.
Read more reviews from our Cannes Film Festival coverage here.
For further information about the event visit the Cannes Film Festival website here.
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