IN WAVES Review

We have a particular weakness for animation that treats itself as art rather than product, that uses the freedom of the drawn line to go somewhere live action cannot follow. So we arrived at In Waves, Phuong Mai Neguyen's adaptation of AJ Dungo's graphic memoir, with genuine anticipation. The images delivered everything we hoped for. The story delivered something we have seen too many times before, dressed up in colors too beautiful for the clichés underneath.

The film is, at its most basic, a dying girl story. Shy teenage boy meets impossibly cool girl. She teaches him to surf. She gets cancer. He learns to grieve. We do not say this to be cruel about material that is, in its origins, genuinely autobiographical. Real loss deserves real witness. But there is a difference between a story being true and a film finding the truth in it, and In Waves too often settles for the former without doing the harder work of the latter.

The animation is extraordinary. In one breathtaking sequence, ocean waves, the bark lines of a tree, and a girl's hair all swirl together into a single connected world. We wished the script had the same fluency.

Where the film genuinely soars is in its visual language. Nguyen weaves three timelines together with remarkable control: the vivid, color-saturated present of AJ and Kristen's early romance; a nearly colorless strand of AJ alone on a beach, building something out of grief; and gorgeous black-and-white sequences tracing the pre-colonial Hawaiian history of surfing, drawn in pen and ink, the strokes of AJ's own hand. These last sequences are the film's finest achievement. They carry the weight of something earned, something researched and loved and rendered with care, and they give the film an intellectual and spiritual dimension that its emotional story never quite matches.

Stephanie Hsu voices Kristen with real spark, and the early scenes between the two teenagers have the awkward, fervent chemistry of young love rendered exactly right. We were with the film completely in these moments. The FaceTime calls, the forbidden nighttime meetings, the first time AJ feels the ocean carry him, all of it is alive and specific and genuinely moving.

And then Kristen gets sick, and the film loses the thing that made it worth watching. Not because illness is the wrong subject but because the film handles it with a smoothness that feels like evasion. Everything is presented at surface level. The crying is tasteful. The road trip to the snowy mountain is picturesque. The fights are resolved. What is missing is the texture of actual loss, the specific and unglamorous and bewildering reality of watching someone you love disappear incrementally. Kristen, who began the film as a person, becomes a series of cancer movie beats. She exists to inspire. She exists to be mourned. She does not, by the end, exist as herself.

AJ was only ever capable of telling his own story. His version of Kristen has no interiority. The film never notices this is a problem.

The ending, in which a voiceover informs us that grief comes in waves and that because you cannot stop the waves you simply have to ride them, aims for profundity and lands somewhere closer to a fortune cookie. It is a dispiriting conclusion to a film that, in its visual imagination, showed genuine ambition. The images deserved better words. Kristen deserved a better film.

Two films into Cannes 2026, we are still waiting for something to fully crack us open. In Waves came close in its best moments, and those moments are real and worth seeing.

But close is not enough, and beauty without truth is just decoration.

🍿 SCORE = 48 / 100