Waves  ★★★★

TREY Edward Shults’ third film, Waves, is exhausting.

This eagerly-awaited drama puts the audience through an emotional wringer in depicting a family’s freefall.

But, at a time when we are all suffering to a degree, the film’s message – that love, empathy and understanding will help overcome pain and sorrow – is welcome and almost cathartic.

It also helps that Waves is exquisitely photographed, inventively directed and beautifully acted with one of the best music scores of the year to date.

Kelvin Harrison Jnr, building on his recent lead role in Luce, brings power and magnetism to the central role of Tyler, a talented college student and promising amateur wrestler..

Tyler and his slightly-younger sister Emily (Taylor Russell) come from a middle-class family, their intense father Ronald (Sterling K. Brown) constantly reminding his son that hard work is the key to ensuring future success and nothing can be taken for granted.

We follow Tyler as he journeys through school and life, initially dealing with the experiences typically thrown at any 18-year-old, before he is faced with a delibilitating shoulder injury that could end his sport career as well as his girlfriend’s pregnancy that could change his life.

A series of traumatic moments cause the lives of Tyler, his girlfriend and their families to spiral and disintegrate, before romance and hope slowly re-emerge from the remains.

There are scenes here of tremendous intensity that evoked memories of the recent Academy Award winning Moonlight and further back to the devastating last act of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream.

Harrison Jnr will win accolades for his performance but Russell and Brown are almost as impressive. One of my favourite new actors, Lucas Hedges, also plays a small, pivotal role.

Shults, who also wrote the film, is an assured director despite this only being his third feature. At times his camera prowls like a tiger around its prey, at others seemingly imitating the manner in which teenagers would film themselves on a mobile phone.

But when emotions are at their most raw, Shults keeps his focus still and locked for maximum impact.

The musical composition team of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross enhance every scene with their constantly changing score.

Waves is a terrific achievement and the film that should drag us all back into the cinema.