THE WAVE (BOLGEN)

Stars: Kristoffer Joner, Ane Dahl Torp, Jonas Hoff Oftebro, Edith Haagenrud-Sande, Fridtjov Såheim, Laila Goody, Artheur Berning, Herman Bernhoft, Eili Harboe and Silje Breivik.
Writers: John Kåre Raake and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg.
Director: Roar Uthaug.

Rating: 3.5/5

International cinema indulges in some old-school Hollywood B-movie thrills with the Norwegian disaster-pic, The Wave. Set against the majestic, UNESCO-protected Geirangerfjord in the Sunnmøre district, director Roar Uthaug slow burns a melodramatic set-up before delivering a spectacular water-wall that more than earns its titular status; the few minutes of screen time afforded the flawlessly realised wave prove every bit as terrifying as the current high-water marks in cinematic tidal surges, seen in J.A. Bayonas’ The Impossible and Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter.

Unlike those films, Uthaug (currently preparing the Tomb Raider reboot with Alicia Vikander) and writers John Kåre Raake and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg don’t draw upon the recent past, instead speculating what may lie ahead for Norway’s south-west region. The steep inclines of Åkerneset Mountain are eroding and pose a real-life threat to the villages of Geiranger and Hellesylt; should the sheer cliff face peel away and plunge into the fjord, a tsunami would all but consume the foreshores. The ten-minute warning period in which the population must evacuate is depicted with chilling realism.

The vast scale of the impending cataclysm is provided a personal perspective in the form of geologist and family man Kristian (Kristoffer Joner), wife Idun (Ane Dahl Torp) and children, teenage son Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) and blonde moppet Julia (Edith Haagenrud-Sande). Kristian is farewelling his role at the earthquake monitoring station; having cut cake with his co-workers, he is all but aboard the Stavanger Ferry and bound for a new, non-fjord life only for his scientific instinct kicks in.

Much of the film’s first half is Eco-Disaster Epic 101. The stern boss, Arvid (Fridtjov Såheim) takes a lot of convincing that the warning signs he has been trained to spot are any warning at all; the family is separated by coincidence; support players pop in and out, uttering just enough dialogue so that we recognise their faces when their inevitable fates are played out. Kristian is a new millennium, ‘every man’ hero; the script deftly defines him as a self-deprecating 40 year-old who doesn’t know what a plumbers wrench is. Past generations would have demanded the casting of square-jawed types, like Paul Newman (see: James Goldstone’s 1980 volcano-themed When Time Ran Out…) or Sylvester Stallone (see: Rob Cohen’s 1996 NYC Tunnel collapse drama, Daylight).

But Uthaug explores a deeper, stronger degree of human drama post-wave. It is to the production’s credit that the human toll of the tsunami is portrayed with as convincing realism as the wave itself; given the modern audience’s familiarity with such horrors, it would have been unwise not to. While searching for his wife and son, Kristian faces the unthinkable when he must walk a corpse-strewn bus; Idun is called upon to commit the unthinkable when a panicky survivor threatens to kill Sondre. The post-event landscape is also afforded a richer, nightmarishly cinematic quality, highlighting the surreal shift in reality such an occurrence leaves behind. The sequence in which Kristian slowly rows a fire-lit waterway littered with the dead reminds us that The Wave may be cut from B-movie cheesecloth, but a fresh, frank perspective is still capable of enlivening old cinematic tropes.