Sundance Film Festival: 'The Wave'

Reviewed by Ryan Stewart

To call The Wave "a German Fight Club" would be both accurate and misleading. Both films aspire to find the recipe for modern fascism, but where Fight Club was precious, and trapped inside the grotesque gulag of Chuck Palahniuk's imagination, The Wave is a somewhat more grounded drama with a more specific focus: to stare deeply into the eyes of today's German youth and find the grandfathers inside. Loosely based on an experiment that was undertaken in 1967 by an American high-school teacher, the film focuses on a German teacher (Juergen Vogel, in a standout performance) who uses an intro political theory class as a guise to mold his naive charges like human silly putty. For one week, he mandates that they must wear identical clothing and identify themselves as a sect with its own name, secret salutes and guiding philosophy, all to show them how easily an ideology of superiority can take root.

Director Dennis Gansel keeps the tempo at headache-levels, driving the story forward with intrusive music and titles every few minutes that tell us we've jumped ahead another day, to illustrate how aimless energy is itself fascistic. The early part of the week-long experiment turns out to be the most interesting, as we watch how the reluctant class of students are easily gulled into thinking that their newfound clannishness is entirely positive. Their activities range from group water polo to banding together to prevent a Wave member from being bullied. A Turkish-German student is noticeably embraced by the group, but those in the school who choose to shun the Wave soon become an acceptable target for scorn and tensions mount. Many references, such as to anti-Nazi heroine Sophie Scholl, may fly over the heads of American audiences, and The Wave loses steam considerably in its final act, but overall it's one of this year's most compelling Sundance offerings. I didn't realize how much it resonated until, days after I saw it, I ran into Jason Ritter, star of Good Dick, and asked him for recommendations. He responded by giving me the secret "Wave" salute from the film, and I momentarily felt a tinge of comradeship.

Comments

[Sean]

Here in the States, The Wave was also a young-adult novel and an afterschool special.

[oakling]

I think it was also an actual social experiment or psych study. All about how easy it is to teach hatred and how hard it is for people to unlearn it even when they know that they were consciously taught it and that it's all nonsense. Such creepy, eerie stuff.