Holy Crap*: 'Waves'

What if "Terms of Endearment" were a horror movie? Trey Edward Shults takes his big splash of a family drama, 2016's "Krisha," and mixes it with the dread of his water-treading last film "It Comes at Night" and he comes out with a grand stab at a masterpiece.

Shults dazzles with images and stabs at the gut emotionally with this tale of a brother and sister whose teenage lives take divergent paths as they explore romantic relationships and deal with underlying family drama. The intensity of it all can be literally breathtaking.

Tyler (Kelvin Harrison Jr. from last year's "Luce") is a star wrestler who is pushed to his physical limits by his demanding father, Ronald (TV star Sterling K. Brown), to the point where Tyler jeopardizes his physical well-being to succeed. A scene in which Tyler knowingly goes to the mat with a serious shoulder injury can make you jump out of your seat with frightful apprehension. Meantime, Tyler navigates a shaky romance with Alexis (Alexa Demie). As Tyler pops his dad's pain pills, he loses his grip on his senior-year responsibilities and begins to unravel.

Shults, working again with cinematographer Drew Daniels, shows great command over his surroundings and pumps up the adrenaline to alternately produce joy or pain. He plays with focus to drift into a scene or a mood. (Although he's a little too infatuated with whirling 360 shots. And most of his demerits stem from the bad habit of relying on text messages -- in small fonts -- to convey critical plot information.) A shot of Tyler and Alexis dancing together on the beach -- her neon orange fingernails splashed against his peroxided short-cropped hair -- is mesmerizing.

A bristling soundtrack -- pop and rap trading off with unnerving ambient music from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross -- perfectly captures the primal way in which teenagers bond and identify with songs. The music is pervasive but critical to the development of the story.

With a slow, onerous fade to black at the halfway mark, Tyler steps aside for his younger sister Emily (Taylor Russell), for a character study that is much more thoughtful and tender as she now enters her senior year. The testosterone feuds between Tyler and their father -- which has left the family scarred -- give way to pauses and introspection. Emily embarks on her own relationship (with a nerdy Lucas Hedges from "Manchester by the Sea"), warily but with an open mind and heart.

Recriminations are unavoidable in this second half. Tears are shed. Lots of them. I imagine that the raw display of The Feels is on a par with Brown's weepy series "This Is Us." And while there probably is at least one too many crying jags, the effusive emotion on display feels earned and effective.

If you buy into this nonstop gut-punch of a movie, you will be wrung out in the end. It's a sharp slap in the face from an earnest filmmaker who cares about your feelings but doesn't handle them very carefully. Buckle up for the ride.

GRADE: A-minus

* -- Holy Crap is an occasional series about unique films, cutting a wide swath from brilliant to awful. Check out previous entries here.

BONUS TRACKS
Kendrick Lamar's "Backseat Freestyle" presages a breakdown by Tyler:



Emily blisses out to "Bluish" by Animal Collective: