You know the hoary cinematic chestnut of the retiring cop whose last day proves quite the pickle? The reality-rooted The Wave ups that finality ante with a frickin’ tsunami! Not for nothing did this taut thriller become the year’s biggest deal in its home country of Norway, where the scenario depicted is expected to happen in the not-too-distant future — all a matter of when, not if.
Reluctantly, family man Kristian (Kristoffer Joner, The Revenant) is leaving the quaint town of Geiranger behind — and his post as a shaggy geologist watching the mountains from command central at the Early Warning Center — for a move to a buttoned-up, better-paying career in the oil industry. He’s having a hard time letting go — a grip that becomes even tighter when an anomaly in groundwater levels raises an instinctual concern that just won’t settle down.
This is why: Because if the mountain were to expand enough to cause a rockslide, a 279-foot wave would result in turn and head straight for the good people of Geiranger, who would receive advance notice of 10 minutes, tops. And that is exactly what happens, smack-dab in the middle of tourist season, with Kristian’s wife (Ane Dahl Torp, Dead Snow) and kids as sitting targets, holed up at a hotel precariously not far enough above sea level.
The Wave is a disaster film of seismic proportions, but a damned fine one. Although it delivers the (damaged) goods in visual spades, it is cast neither in the all-star Irwin Allen cheese of the 1970s, nor the blockbuster-slick style of the subgenre’s 1990s resurgence (as seen in Twister, Volcano, Daylight, et al.). Plausibility trumps panache; science is practically a member of the supporting cast; subplots are kept to a bare minimum; celebrity cameos are nonexistent; and, like 2012’s true-life tsunami tale, The Impossible, the story is free of sentiment until the final scene. Nothing in director Roar Uthaug’s previous hit, the 2006 frozen-over ski-lodge slasher Cold Prey, suggests the sure hand that guides The Wave to such great heights. —Rod Lott