The Wave: a Mamma Mia MLF that hits hard (review)

Inspired by a MeToo uprising at a Chilean university, Sebastian Lelio creates a tense musical comedy seeking to provoke a vibrant debate. A great political and musical film.

First the club: the strobes, the sweat and the saturated corridors. The pace gradually increases as the camera cuts through the crowd. The nightclub is chaos until the screen freezes on a girl dancing. Everything calms down, everything tenses up. A little later, we find this girl in the courtyard of a Chilean university. This time, the bodies organize themselves, the camera breathes, and suddenly everything explodes: the concrete becomes a snare drum, the crowd an orchestra. Chanted slogans, slamming choreography, the pure energy of the musical number sends shivers down the spine.

Julia is a music student, and she plunges headfirst into the feminist revolt when rumors of abuse rock her university. But as the fight becomes more structured, she relives a confusing episode with Max, her singing teacher’s assistant. What did she really experience after the nightclub? Should we say everything right away? Denounce publicly or play the procedural game? The wave that carried Julia is swallowing her. And the campus becomes a ring where the intimate shatters the collective.

The Wave is a true political film. But Sebatian Lelio says nothing. He braids contradictions, slows down when anger accelerates, listens when the crowd roars, distributes the words (or the tunes). Turning a student uprising into a musical sounds like a crazy gamble, but it’s totally successful – and we find ourselves thinking of Emilia Perez more than once. Firstly because there is cinema. The first choreography in the university is astonishing in its readability, its fluidity and its energy. The camera breathes, slides, returns, without ever crushing the faces into the abstraction of a mass. We see the lines forming, cracking, recomposing themselves – it’s politics at body level. The soundtrack pulses without masking reality: the groove is more than cool, catchy. We dance, and we think. This is the other strong point of the film. Gloria Bell’s director is not decorative and his choreographies are first and foremost manifestos; its choruses carry demonstrations and its zooms dissect the balance of power.

Lelio has been criticized for his dialogues which in places take on the curvature of a slogan, his characters who sometimes slide towards the archetype (the inflexible activist, the cautious rector, the progressive teacher with variable geometry, the victimized opponent who describes himself as a martyr). But this temptation of the schema is not a weakness, it is the assumed risk of a film which wants to give voice to everyone, to embrace all points of view. The Wave is didactic in the noble sense (it enlightens), dialectical in the strong sense (it confronts). If he uses archetypes it is to better fit the cacophony of positions into the same framework. And the insane energy that carries the whole thing (the nervous tempo and the irony that deflates certainties at the moment when they become frozen) wins everything. We move from collective to solo, from testimony to satire, from a kiss to a general assembly: the film breathes through contrasts.

Until the finale (the general occupation): there, Lelio flirts with the meta, allows himself a nod to the fourth wall. The songs become real scenes of pleading and the choreography takes on contradictory accents – the lines respond to each other in canon, the gestures oppose each other. It’s Demy plugged into a megaphone, a Mamma Mia MLF, in short: political pop that refuses to pose. The Wave may not be perfect, but its visual power, its drive and its way of embracing the debate without ever closing it make it a powerful spectacle of our time. The wave will break. You’ll be a little wet – but once dry, much more lucid

Of Sebastián Lelio. With Daniela López, Lola Bravo, Avril Aurora… Duration: 2h09. Released November 5, 2025