Review: Between Waves – “Flawed but intriguing and worth some attention”

Directed by Virginia Abramovich
Starring Fiona Graham, Luke Robinson, Sebastian Deery, Stacey Bernstein, Edwige Jean-Pierre

Freelance photographer Jamie (Fiona Graham) is bereft after her physicist boyfriend, Isaac (Luke Robinson), vanishes with no explanation. Attempting to get on with work while constantly calling the detective in charge of the investigation, she’s unable to accept that he is gone, either left, or something has happened to him and he’s dead somewhere, while her friends and colleagues worry about her state of mind.

This situation isn’t helped by Jamie glimpsing Isaac – or is it really Isaac? – and trying to follow him, calling out but the figure in front of her never stops. Is she actually seeing him, or is this a mixture of psychological stress and relying on drugs to get through the days? Or, is it something more… You see, Isaac and his colleague Renata (Stacey Bernstein), were working on a complex project involving parallel realities and timelines, and there are many hints that Isaac may, perhaps, have been at more than just the advanced theoretical stage. What if he has made that final breakthrough, what if he is now able to move between alternate versions of his own timestream, or even multiple versions of him from those other timestream can cross to ours? Unable to let this idea go, Jamie pursues it doggedly, but the waters become every muddier.

This is an extremely intriguing slice of low-budget, Indy science fiction – like the micro-budget Primer a few years back it trades in clever, head-scratching ideas (that don’t rely on a massive budget). The idea of parallel worlds is nothing new of course, nor is the idea of differing versions of ourselves crossing from one to the other (Fringe did this very well, for example). But the approach Abramovich takes, where we often can’t be sure if this is serious and Isaac is somehow slipping between dimensions, or if Jamie has simply lost her grasp of reality due to grief and stress, adds an engrossing layer to the story.

While I found that side of things fascinating and thought-provoking, I must confess I wasn’t as convinced by the relationships, not least the central one between Jamie and Isaac. The actors felt as if they were doing their best, but the way it was constructed – we see Jamie trying to work through her grief and worry about vanished Isaac and only get their relationship filled in with flashbacks later – left me feeling I had no real grasp of their relationship, and so it was hard to empathise, which left me feeling somewhat cut off from the characters. I’m not sure if this was just due to the structural choices of the director and editor, or if the smaller budget simply meant they couldn’t have time to do more scenes to build that relationship up before letting the viewer see the effect on Jamie of Isaac’s disappearance.

While I found that annoying, it certainly didn’t spoil my overall viewing – it’s a clever little concept, worked hard by an indie film team on a tiny budget to great effect, and that’s impressive, and boasts some nice little touches that can almost pass you by without noticing, such as using reflective surfaces numerous times to create momentary duplicates of characters, hinting at the greater idea of a multiverse where there really are multiple versions of each person. Flawed but intriguing and worth some attention.

Between Waves is out now on DVD from Reel2Reel Films.