The Wave

American filmmakers take note: this is how you make a disaster movie. After playing a handful of international festivals last year, the first official trailer for Norwegian disaster drama The Wave has rolled in, promising a film that’s not overly concerned with the spectacle as much as the people said spectacle is actually affecting. Similar to Juan Antonio Bayona’s impressively riveting 2007 film The Impossible, The Wave does what Roland Emmerich and his acolytes are no longer interested in doing: letting us get to know and care about the people whose lives are about to be destroyed by a 300-foot wave.

The Wave really is just about one single wave that decimates a Norwegian town, and its impact on a small group of characters, primarily a geologist and his family. That’s it — but that’s all it needs to be. This film is a reminder that disaster movies work best when they focus on the characters and their struggles, not the big special effects they’re running from.