Waves 2019 ^new^ — High-Quality & Easy

The first half of the film belongs to (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a high-school wrestling star living under the immense, well-intentioned weight of his father Ronald’s (Sterling K. Brown) expectations. Ronald’s philosophy is born from a hard-earned truth: as a Black man in America, Tyler must work twice as hard to be considered half as good.

Waves is sonically ambitious. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross contributed to the score, supplemented by a carefully curated pop and R&B soundtrack. The sound design is immersive: music often bleeds into dialogue, internal monologues are presented with reverberant textures, and ambient noise escalates tension in non-diegetic ways. The interplay of score and pop songs underscores emotional beats rather than merely accompanying them, with tracks used to articulate the characters’ interior lives. waves 2019