It may sound ultra cynical to say so, but a film such as Phuong Mai Nguyen’s In Waves has no real business at a festival like Cannes. Earnestness just doesn’t play well in these parts, and just when you think the film has reached absolute peak earnestness, it finds a way to sneak just a little bit more in there. It’s based on AJ Dungo’s 2019 graphic novel of the same name, in which the skater-artist (voiced by Will Sharpe) charts his tumultuous relationship with super-cool surfer girl Kristen (Stephanie Hsu).
The film is animated, and it’s one of those cases of, beyond a basic graphic fidelity to its source, it’s not entirely clear why the story needed to be told in this way. There are no expressionist flights of fancy, or dramatic peaks that would be enhanced by the pictorial form of animation. If anything, the animation acts as a distancing device, adding a barrier of unreality to the intimacies of courtship and, eventually, a story about the fragility of the human body.
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The film initially rides on a wave of gawky surfer humour, but nothing with any genuine wit to it. There are 1980s Brat pack vibes to AJ’s fumbled attempts at a hook-up as he accidentally rams into Kristen at a school dance then quickly proceeds to slide into her DMs to see if she might actually be warm for his form. And she is, although initially under the guise of wanting to transform him from a skater to a surfer – a big deal considering AJ has a moral fear of water.
With a connection fully-forged, all they have left now is get spend the remainder of their days getting loved-up in their wet suits, all to a soundtrack of gooey, swelling synth music. But it all goes wrong when Kristen starts getting strange, intense pains in her leg and her future as a border is thrown into jeopardy. It’s at this point where the film switches from earnest to maudlin, essentially rolling out like an animated Nicholas Sparks movie as the pair attempt to come to terms with the dismal hand they’ve been dealt. It’s a film whose specific milieu may draw its fans, but it also acts too much like this story hasn’t been told a million times before.