 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Between Waves • Year: 2020 • Country: Canada • Director: Virginia Abramovich • Main cast: Fiona Graham, Luke Robinson, Sebastian Deery, Stacey Bernstein • Runtime: 100 minutes • Production company: Jordan Entertainment, Breathe Entertainment • TRAILER
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The thing I love the most about science-fiction is that the genre has no boundaries; if an idea is good enough it doesn’t matter if it is far from reality as we know it. You just have to justify it with a technology that might not exist now but, why not, it could happen. Time traveling, different dimensions, the exploitation of dreams… the options are infinite, only the limits of imagination can stop it. Although not anything goes, after all, you must present a plausible situation otherwise the audience might not connect with your proposal.
And I think there is where Between Waves (2020) fails. At first, the proposal from the movie is exciting: the fact that different dimensions exist, them all with the same characters, but where the free will of life take them to different paths. A concept that also Doctor Strange exploits in the MCU, to find a popular referent everybody might more or less be familiar with. The main problem with Between Waves (2020) is that as the plot gets thicker and we get deeper in the story it all loses its sense. The characters jump from one dimension to another, you don’t know who is who, and it all gets too confusing. And, in the end, the final resolution leaves everybody cold.
Another weak point in the movie is that the story focuses too much on the romance between the two main characters, the missing scientist that seems to have made the breakpoint discovery of the interdimensional jump, and his lover, a marketing photographer that won’t accept the loss. The constant grieving sequences and the flashbacks to different moments of the couple’s life together add more confusion to a story that only in the terrains of science-fiction was already tricky enough to follow. The subject of the dimensional traveling, characters appearing and interacting in a plain that is not theirs, is still attractive to the brain, but the noise created by the chaotic narrative, the interest disconnections due to excessive drama that hurts the development of the story, and those pseudo-scientific concepts that are hard to follow as they present them, make the watching of Between Waves (2020) a confusing experience.
As a positive aspect to outstand, the locations of the town of São Miguel, in the Portuguese Azores archipelago, are not only beautiful to the eyes but also work to add controlled chaos to the story. Something violent as nature, but that will always follow a set of predictable laws and order, serve as the perfect landscape to set the action. The character of the woman searching for answers melts perfectly in the location, with the environment becoming her best ally.
Between Waves (2020) is another example of a sensitive and minimalistic science-fiction drama, a subgenre that is quite big at the moment and can bring both delicious jewels of the imagination or confusing trips like the one we have in hands here. The actors at times seem as lost as the audience is, confused by the development of the story and unsure of what path the whole pack is taking. The debutant director and co-writer Virginia Abramovich pays the price of a novice who struggles in putting together a concept and set of happenings that might have a sense in her mind but gets lost when she tries to communicate them. Still, the main idea of us living in one dimension but being uncountable alternative realities where our selves are having a different life is a very exciting concept and can keep a drifting movie like this alive. And, who knows, maybe right now in another dimension Between Waves (2020) is becoming a hit film that drags the masses into bliss. But, in the one where we settle, it is not flowing as it should.
RATE: 4/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt10663608
