Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch In Waves
2026 · Phuong Mai Nguyen · In Waves on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the sky's color shift with the mood of a scene. (light)
Nguyen washes scenes in pink and blue Californian light, using saturation and warmth instead of a camera lens to set the emotional temperature.
Payoff: The color is doing the feeling directly, not just decorating a scene that already has one. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: the tint on screen is the feeling itself, not a description of it.
Watch the ocean seem to move AJ rather than the reverse. (staging)
When he finally rides a wave, the water carries the motion of the scene, and his body goes still while the world around him keeps moving.
Payoff: The ocean does the acting here, which is a very different feeling than watching someone surf. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the character goes still and the world takes over the motion instead.
Notice the water look painted rather than simulated. (camera)
The waves carry a grained, hand-touched texture built from custom tools, closer to something you could imagine drawing than to a slick, photoreal simulation.
Payoff: The water looks made by a hand, which matters in a film this attentive to touch and loss.
Listen for electronic textures under the orchestral swell. (sound)
Rob and Oklou blend orchestral, electronic, and pop sounds, keeping the register close to the teenagers' own world while saving fuller orchestral weight for the ocean.
Payoff: The score tracks two different worlds, a teenage one and an oceanic one, before the story ever merges them.
Watch AJ's drawing hand move with the same care as Kristen's surfing. (performance)
The animation gives AJ's sketching and Kristen's surfing the same attentive, unhurried motion, treating drawing and riding a wave as versions of the same act.
Payoff: Two different passions get animated as the same kind of concentration, which quietly links the two leads.
Once you have seen it
Notice a present scene sit right next to a remembered one. (cutting)
The editing moves associatively between the present romance and earlier memory rather than in strict order, so past and present sit side by side instead of one leading to the other.
Payoff: Grief here is built through that arrangement, not explained to you afterward in a single scene. In the reading: order of time / coexistence. The reading calls this sheets of past: memory as a whole coexisting order you drift through, not a dated flashback.
Notice the surfing history scenes return between the romance. (structure)
Passages on Duke Kahanamoku and Tom Blake's place in surfing history keep surfacing underneath AJ and Kristen's story, laying a documentary past beneath the private one.
Payoff: One couple's grief ends up resting inside a much longer human relationship with the sea.
Notice how little any single action actually changes anything. (performance)
AJ skates, draws, surfs, and loves harder, but none of it functions as a lever on Kristen's illness, and the film never stages a scene where an act fixes it.
Payoff: Facing the illness, not resolving it, turns out to be the whole shape of the story.
Carry this in: Watch the ocean's color and motion as closely as the couple, since the film puts as much feeling into the water.