‘The Wave’ Review: Sebastián Lelio’s Feminist Protest Musical is Vibrantly Staged but Dramatically Flat

Perhaps coincidentally, the title “The Wave” recalls Todd Strasser’s 1980s YA novel of that name, which became a staple of Gen-X and early-millennial English syllabi, on the strength of some easily digestible allegory in its tale of a notionally empowering student movement gone fascistically awry. A fast-building student movement is also the subject of Sebastián Lelio’s new film “The Wave,” though in this case its politics stay strictly and righteously on course, rippling through a university campus enraged by manifold cases of sexual misconduct against young women by male peers and staff. Inspired by a real-life wave of #MeToo-adjacent demonstrations that shut down multiple Chilean colleges in 2018, Lelio has collated an assortment of testimonies into a stylized modern-dance musical centered on one fictional victim — a bold approach that yields spotty rewards as both entertainment and message movie.

Composed and choreographed with energetic aplomb, shattering various fourth (and fifth and sixth) walls with purposeful abandon, Lelio’s first feature made in his homeland since 2017’s Oscar-winning “A Fantastic Woman” unspooled in Cannes’ non-competitive Premiere sidebar, and is sure to remain a prominent, singular object on the festival and arthouse scenes going forward. The closest comparison one might make is to last year’s “Emilia Pérez,” though Lelio’s fusion of stomping song-and-dance numbers with political cheerleading is less couched in irony and melodrama. Even at its most formally playful, the film is marked by an earnestness of tone that makes it feel like work, especially given a two-hour-plus runtime that exposes the repetitiveness of its rhetoric and the sparseness of its drama.

“You all think you know your voice,” says a vocal instructor at a Santiago performing arts university, before assuring them that they have much to learn. Her comments are directed particularly at Julia (Daniela López, a newcomer selected from a nationwide casting call), a promising student still struggling to reach the highest notes of her potential range. But if Julia hasn’t yet found her voice as a singer, the film repeatedly underlines, she has further still to go in finding it as a woman: Her tranformation from passive go-alonger, shy to speak truth to power, to crowd-mobilizing activist forms the spine of the script by Lelio and his female co-writers Manuela Infante, Josefina Fernández and Paloma Salas.

In any event, Julia’s class is cut short by a sudden call to arms, as students rush en masse to the university’s central courtyard, while a vast banner unfurls down one wing of the building, declaring, “THIS UNIVERSITY GRANTS DEGREES TO RAPISTS.” The crowd breaks into an aggressively coordinated, warrior-style dance routine, bluntly calling on the faculty’s predatory men to “go fuck yourselves a bit” — the first and most arresting of the film’s many musical sequences, distinguished by the angular, declarative violence of Ryan Heffington’s choreography and the abrasive clash of brass and percussion in the score by Lelio’s regular composer Matthew Herbert. Few of the original songs in “The Wave” are particularly melodic or memorable, though the film aims for cumulative performance-piece impact — less Broadway than experimental theater workshop.

It’s the unsung dramatic material between these samey but undeniably swaggering setpieces that stall proceedings, let down by bluntly declamatory dialogue and one-note performances as Julia’s individual tale comes to the fore of both the film’s narrative and the onscreen revolution. Having made out with stalker-y teaching assistant Max (Nestor Cantillana) in the film’s opening moments — a throbbing, strobe-lit nightclub scene echoed, down to the thumping bass on the soundtrack, in a later, more mordant protest number — Julia eventually asserts that she was later sexually assaulted by him. Initially doubtful of her claim to survivor status, she’s emboldened by her female friends to speak openly of her experience, which in turn becomes the cause célèbre that carries the entire movement.

As the symbolic face of an emergingly outspoken generation of Chilean women, Julia is a compelling figure. As an individual personality, she’s less vivid and defined, inevitably registering as a composite character, also called on to represent the under-platformed working classes in this struggle. Though she hesitantly volunteers to head the testimonies committee as the university shutdown gets fully under way, her fellow students’ stories are folded briskly into montages by editor Soledad Salfate; though many of the musical numbers are performed in shouty unison, the film’s design doesn’t really accommodate a rising panoply of voices. Broad stabs of satire target the hypocritical, patriarchal victim-blaming enacted by the police and other authorities, as well as privileged self-help rhetoric that stresses comforting concepts like resilience over the collective’s preference for rage.

The film’s lively, restless construction does whet the appetite for Lelio to tackle further musical fare on screen: He’s the rare director in the genre who actually cares to watch whole bodies in motion, rather than edited into sundry thrusting limbs. DP Benjamín Echazarreta favors tracking shots that are propulsive but not invasive, giving dancers ample room for maneuver while the camera itself moves to their rhythm, while a limited, saturated color palette of suitably oceanic blues and corporeal reds contributes to the stark, alt-theatrical air of proceedings. Finally, a Brechtian late-film reality shift calls attention to Lelio’s own conflicted presence as the male helmer of this expressly feminist project — though “The Wave” hardly merits extra credit for calling itself out.