Waves (2019) on Netflix
Tyler Williams is a high school senior, a wrestler driven hard by his father Ronald. He hides a shoulder injury, and his girlfriend Alexis Lopez tells him she may be pregnant.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb7.5/1039,221 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes84%
Trailer
Plot summary
Tyler Williams wrestles for his high school team, and his father Ronald pushes him hard. Tyler hides a shoulder injury from his family and his teammates, stealing Ronald's painkillers to keep it secret. A doctor tells him the shoulder tear is serious and that surgery should happen soon. Tyler refuses to sit out the rest of his season and keeps wrestling until a match throws him onto the injured shoulder and ends his career. His girlfriend, Alexis Lopez, then sends him a message: her period is late. He drives her to a clinic for an abortion, and protesters outside make her reconsider having one.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Waves (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Kelvin Harrison Jr. secretly sent his friend Taylor Russell the Waves script weeks before her official audition, breaking casting protocol because he was convinced the two of them would play convincing siblings, and that gamble helped her land the role of Emily.
- Director Trey Edward Shults replaced his regular composer Brian McOmber with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross after Reznor emailed out of the blue saying he was a fan; Shults flew to Los Angeles to meet them for lunch and hired them on the spot.
- Clearing Kanye West's 'I Am a God' for the soundtrack took months of negotiation, and the song was only approved on the condition that a 'clean' version be used, because West was moving away from secular music at the time.
- Shults began shooting Waves before he had secured the rights to several songs he had written into the script, and he agreed to simply cut those scenes rather than reshoot if the clearances fell through; Frank Ocean cleared his songs only after being sent a letter and a rough cut of the finished film.
