Remember Troll Hunter? André Øvredal’s Norwegian cult movie that offered a new spin on the found footage template, replete with jaw-dropping visuals and a palpable sense of scale. Fast forward six years and we have another potential genre gem coming out of the country, this time in the form of Roar Uthaug’s The Wave.
A disaster movie at its core, Uthaug – who made the headlines before the turn of the year after taking the reins of Warner Bros.’ as-yet-untitled Tomb Raider reboot – has peeled back the CG circus that often engulfs movies of this genre to focus on the story driving the destruction glimpsed on screen. Taking place in the picturesque tourist town of Geiranger, The Wave in many respects plays to the beats of your classic disaster movie – scientists warning of an imminent, earth-shattering event, humanity willfully ignores all common sense, and one family is thrust into peril.
Despite all that, today’s first trailer for The Wave balances spectacle with character, and it has every chance to do to the disaster genre what Troll Hunter did to found footage.
Starring Ane Dahl Torp and Jonas Oftebro, Øvredal’s natural epic crashes into theatres on March 4. Our own Sam Woolf caught The Wave at TIFF 2015, and you check out his own early impressions here. It was presented by Norway as the country’s official submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, though it missed the cut for nominations.
The experienced geologist Kristian Eikfjord has accepted a job offer out of town. He is getting ready to move from the city of Geiranger with his family when he and his colleagues measure small geological changes in the underground. Kristian gets worried, and his worst nightmare is about to come true when the alarm goes off and the disaster is inevitable. With less than 10 minutes to react, it becomes a race against time to save as many as possible, including his own family.