Virginia Abramovich

(On Cable TV, April 2021) Few things are as frustrating as an ambitious film that fails to click, and while I’ll be one of the first to point out Between Waves’ strengths, I’m not going to be so positive when it comes to the film itself. As a low-budget Canadian film, it goes for high concept rather than spectacle, as a photographer mourning her physicist husband becomes convinced that he’s still alive and travelling between parallel universes. Told in non-linear fashion, the film details their romance, his death, her search for him and eventually a trip to the Azores in order to piece together the puzzle of their existence. It’s an ambitious concept, and at times it looks as if writer-director Virginia Abramovich has what it takes to get it right. But as the film goes on, it also becomes more muddled. Billed as “a metaphysical love story,” it leaves realism behind to operate on a more abstract level, to the point where the rules it has established for itself eventually seem arbitrary or mere suggestions. Clearly, the film is executed in a register that doesn’t play by the usual aesthetic preferences of genre Science Fiction — which may be an advantage for some. But it takes some patience to get through even the film’s 100 minutes, and some indulgence as the urgency of the first act gives way to a lackadaisical trip to the Azores and then a meandering third act that seems to delay the inevitable. Between Waves has good ideas (as someone who wrote a few science fiction novels about parallel universes, I give a thumbs-up at the film’s take on converging realities but I’m not so enthusiastic about the way it’s not explored) — alas, the result doesn’t have the spark of the premise.