THE WAVE (Bølgen)

Rating: 4

A refreshing Nordic reserve permeates the action/adventure in Norway’s Oscar™ contender, THE WAVE. While most films vying for the foreign language award are of the small, intimate, and character-driven variety, THE WAVE pulls out all the stops with a disaster epic that is edge-of-your-seat suspenseful.  Even the usual clichés to be found in the genre seem less stale, and almost piquant, here, like the little girl holding on for dear life to the stuffed bunny rabbit she loves while threatened by the eponymous tsunami.

This is no ordinary tsunami. It’s an inland one, caused by a mountain sliding into a fjord in one of Norway’s more picturesque rural locales. While this one is fictional, the one that actually struck a half-century ago is remembered in the opening sequence, which also does a tidy job of introducing the audience to the stakes if something goes wrong. To prevent the complete surprise that accompanied the historical disaster, there is now constant surveillance of the mountain, staffed by a crack team of geologists. None is more crack that Kristian (Kristoffer Joner), a meticulous if shaggy geologist who is bidding adieu to his job in Geiranger for a more lucrative one in the private sector. Though it means getting a proper haircut and wearing tie, though it means uprooting his family who like the country life, and though it means giving up a ramshackle house with soul, Christian has no doubts that this is the right thing to do. And so on his last day at work, he enjoys the cake and the good-natured ribbing before moving on.

But wait.  Not so fast.

As is customary, after the farewell party, something odd registers on the sensitive monitoring equipment. And, as is also customary, while Kristian is literally driving out of town for the last time, teenage son and adorable pre-teen daughter in tow, he puts it all together about what it happening, and turns the car around to go save the day.  And thus he spends the rest of the film doing just that with varying degrees of success. He is, not to put too fine a point on it, the Indiana Jones of geologists.

With a script that is economical but effective in both sentiment and exposition, there is a minimum of fuss in establishing the characters, including Idun (Ane Dahl Torp) Christian’s hotel-manager wife, and then realistically separating them before the wave hits. There’s just enough of a squabble between this dynamic couple, still sexually charged after all these years, to give credence to them being apart, each with one of the children.  Having established Idun’s competence with a plumber’s wrench in her first scene, it is not a stretch to have her take charge of the hotel guests when the alarm sounds giving them 10 minutes before the tsunami swamps the hotel and the town in which it is located. Nor is it a stretch to watch her own feats of derring-do while dealing with the screaming mimis around her and also outrunning the killer wave.

And quite a wave it is. The special effects are first rate and pulse-pounding. When someone stands transfixed as the wave rises up before her, taller than the surrounding mountains, you can’t blame her. It’s horrifying, but also spectacular. So are Christian’s close calls, from repelling into the most seismically active mountain crevice, to swimming underwater for far too long in a desperate rescue attempt, Joner is a superhero, yet also an everyman running on the adrenalin that comes of wanting his family safe.  Yet THE WAVE does, not rely solely on the big stuff. It builds the suspense of a mountain about to tumble.  A flock of birds suddenly takes flight in the middle of the night. And when that alarm sounds, we see not the wave gaining strength in the narrow confines of the fjord, but rather a wide shot of the town, lights popping on one by one as people awake to the end of their world.

THE WAVE’s flaws, a few far-fetched coincidences come to mind, are far outweighed by the genuinely good time to be had by all. Joner’s fever pitch of growing intensity as the situation becomes more and more dire for him and for those he loves, and a lean approach to storytelling at even those most dire moments, more than compensates for them.