In Waves · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the water, because the film starts there and keeps coming back to it. A wave rises, painted rather than rendered, its face grained like something a hand actually touched. Nguyen and her team built custom tools for exactly this — not photoreal spray but a surface with weight and grain, a wave you could imagine drawing rather than simulating. Hold that image. Almost everything the film understands about grief is folded into how it animates water.

Here is a way to watch it. In his two Cinema books, Gilles Deleuze splits film history down the middle. On one side, the movement-image: a character sees a situation, acts on it, and the action resolves things — the ordinary engine of drama, cause pushing toward cathartic effect. On the other side, the time-image, which begins the moment action can no longer resolve anything. The character stops acting and starts watching. Time is no longer the measure of movement; it is felt directly, as itself. In Waves lives on the far side of that break, and knowing this changes what the film looks like it's doing.

Because think about the story honestly. Two teenagers fall in love; one of them gets a terminal cancer. There is no act that fixes this. AJ can skate, draw, surf, love harder — none of it is a lever on the disease. The dossier says they 'face adversity,' and that word is exact: facing is not resolving. AJ becomes what Deleuze calls a voyant, a seer — someone who looks and endures rather than an agent who repairs. The hospital passages, all stillness and held compositions, are what Deleuze names pure optical situations, opsigns: the image where there is nothing to do but see. His point is not that this is passive. It's the opposite. When the reflex arc from perceiving to acting finally snaps, we start, for the first time, to actually see time.

And how does the film hand us time? Not as a clock. It hands us memory. Reviews describe cutting that moves 'through grief and memory,' associative rather than chronological, the present-tense romance braided with what has already happened. Deleuze has a precise name for this that is finer than 'flashback.' A flashback — a mnemosign — is a dated card neatly filed: this happened, then, and here it is. What In Waves does is bigger. It gives us sheets of past: the past as a whole coexisting order you drift through, where a present moment and a remembered one sit side by side without one being subordinate to the other. This is the film's deepest craft debt, and it runs straight back to Hiroshima mon amour — the Resnais-and-Duras template Deleuze himself reads as the birthplace of exactly this, grief assembled by montage, present intimacy laced with involuntary flashes so that mourning is built, not explained.

The surf-history strand is a second sheet, laid deeper still. Duke Kahanamoku, Tom Blake, the Polynesian origins of riding waves: a documentary past slid underneath the private one, so that a single death rests inside a long human relationship with the sea. This is Deleuze's fabulation — the turn from private incident to legend, one girl's illness set against the myth of the ocean itself. The film is legending its own grief, giving it ancestors.

Then there is the wave, and here Deleuze offers the loveliest tool for it. Sometimes, he writes, the character goes still and the world takes over the movement instead — the dance that absorbs the dancer. Nguyen insists the film is 'absolutely not about the technique of surfing' but about the ocean as 'a way to connect to something more sacred.' When AJ finally rides Kristen's water, he is not acting on it. It moves through him. Grief becomes kinetic not because the self does anything, but because the world is in motion around a person who has gone quiet. That is the movement of world, and it is why the surfing scenes feel like mourning rather than sport.

Colour carries the same weight. Animation has no lens, so the film modulates feeling through Californian light — pink-and-blue skies, coastal glare — colour that soaks a scene and becomes its emotion rather than describing an object. Deleuze calls this the affective use of colour: the tint is the affect.

What does this do to film as an art? The time-image was a difficult, adult, modernist mode, born in live-action European art cinema. Teen sick-lit, its natural genre cousin, almost always runs on the movement-image tearjerker machine, cause and effect tuned for the cry. Nguyen quietly refuses the machine. She takes the drift, the seeing, the coexisting pasts, and pours them into hand-crafted animation for a young audience — extending the graphic-memoir lineage of Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir while smuggling Resnais inside it. Animation, it turns out, is the medium best suited to interior states: memory that won't sit still, water that behaves like feeling.

Watch it again and notice the discipline of it: not once does an action save anyone. Then watch the wave carry what the plot cannot.