Between Waves: Tragic Romance, Big Theoretical Ideas and Some Problems Keeping It Real

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

The maddening rabbit-hole of quantum mechanics, parallel universes and space jumping seems particularly tempting to Canadian filmmakers, judging by recent films like Jeremy LaLonde’s James vs. His Future Self, and Akash Sherman’s New Age astronomy romance Clara.

So, it’s not as if Virginia Abramovich’s oddly ambivalent parallel-universe romance Between Waves is breaking new ground thematically. It is an interesting tale of loss, obsession and ultimately acceptance wrapped around a narrative that is, if one thinks about it, ultimately horrifying and sinister (though the film doesn’t present it that way).

Isaac (Luke Robinson) tries to convince Jamie (Fiona Graham) to submerge herself in a parallel world.

It looks visually sumptuous. Much of Between Waves, the parts not shot in Toronto, is shot in the Azores, on the gleamingly beautiful island of São Miguel, a seemingly impossible place to shoot badly. And the concept is irresistibly intriguing. 

But the story’s emotional gears don’t mesh, to the point that the actors seem reticent at times, as if they’re not sure what to express. Lead actress Fiona Graham gets her catharsis every so often screaming the F-word at the top of her lungs to no one in particular.

Jamie (Graham) is a fashion photographer, in a state over the police-investigated disappearance of her longtime boyfriend Isaac (Luke Robinson), a cosmologist obsessed with timelines and parallel worlds. This is pretty much a flag for the audience, even if Jamie, after listening to him talk about it for five years, is initially slow to consider that Isaac may have finally found what he was looking for.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

There’s a dream-state to Abramovich’s film, an is-she-crazy? consideration fueled by the early mention that Jamie has given up anti-anxiety drugs because… well, she’s also throwing up a lot early in the movie. It’s mentioned more than once that giving up “benzos” cold turkey can cause hallucinations.

Hallucination or not, Isaac begins appearing only to her, telling her that to be together, she must take the Azores holiday they’d been planning before his disappearance. He also tells her their two worlds are connected by water. This last is problematic, since the young Jamie had found her mother dead in a bathtub, and water isn’t her favourite form of matter.

There’s a surfeit of characters that barely squeeze in to the plot. There’s a cop (Edwige Jean-Pierre) who vacillates on foul play before deciding Jamie had something to do with Isaac’s disappearance after his body turns up. There’s Jamie’s drug-dealing assistant with inappropriate romantic intentions. There’s Miguel (Miguel Damião), a bereaved São Miguel bar owner who becomes Jamie’s sounding board, but has very little narrative part to play. There’s Isaac’s longtime research partner Renata (Stacey Bernstein) who suggests secret military interest in Isaac’s work (a thread that goes nowhere). 

And all throughout the Azores, Jamie repeatedly encounters Isaac and… herself, or her other self. The ambiguous parts of Between Waves are its strongest. But the left field plot twist that attempts to tie it all together made me rethink what sympathy I ever had for the central characters. 

Between Waves is interesting but flawed. But for me at least, the interesting parts were worth the watch.

Between Waves. Directed and co-written by Virginia Abramovich. Starring Fiona Graham, Luke Robinson and Stacey Bernstein.