There is a del­i­cate thresh­old sep­a­rat­ing self-aware­ness from petu­lance, and the direc­tors who know how to best thread it under­stand that say­ing less often does the most. With The Wave, Sebastián Lelio offers a staunch, loud exam­ple of the oppo­site, craft­ing a film that is not only com­fort­able to stay with­in the realm of the self-con­grat­u­la­to­ry but expects you to applaud him for it too.

The Chilean direc­tor fol­lows up his Oscar-win­ning dra­ma A Fan­tas­tic Woman with a musi­cal loose­ly based on the 2018 #MeToo-adja­cent demon­stra­tions that closed mul­ti­ple col­leges in Chile after stu­dents occu­pied the build­ings to demand stronger pun­ish­ment for sex­u­al harass­ment with­in the cam­pus. In this fic­tion­al­ized effort, one such stu­dent is Julia (Daniela Lopez), a music pupil whose big ambi­tions are jux­ta­posed with the hum­ble set­ting of her mother’s mini-mart, where the fam­i­ly also lives.

Lelio cre­ates Julia as a stand-in for the many young women who brave­ly came for­ward with their sto­ries of abuse dur­ing the tit­u­lar move­ment, hav­ing her as the face of the rebel­lion and the key wit­ness for the pro­tes­tors’ case. This piv­otal nar­ra­tive choice is the first of many mishaps in a deeply mis­guid­ed film, as it bur­dens with respon­si­bil­i­ty a char­ac­ter whose entire arc revolves around a pro­nounced resis­tance to vic­tim­iza­tion. The direc­tor isn’t explic­it­ly ask­ing for sym­pa­thy as much as empa­thy for Julia, but there is no shel­ter­ing the char­ac­ter from the pur­pose­ful­ly exhaust­ing fram­ing she is seen through.

Julia point­ed­ly chews gum, the impos­si­bly irri­tat­ing, moist noise a fre­quent sen­so­r­i­al com­pan­ion to her screen pres­ence. After drain­ing it of flavour, she plucks it from her mouth and, still wet, push­es it under whichev­er sur­face is near­est — be it a din­er table or the cold, metal­lic work desk in the cor­ner of a police sta­tion. It is as if Lelio is try­ing to ham­mer in the point that women do not need to be like­able and con­tained to be believed, a plot boomerang that ric­o­chets with great force only achiev­ing condescension.

The gum-chew­ing isn’t the only thing Lelio ham­mers at with gus­to through­out the musi­cal. He often dwells inside the mini-mart, the cam­era almost a safari guide intro­duc­ing the view­er to this world that could not pos­si­bly elic­it any­thing else than a flight response. At the uni­ver­si­ty, sev­er­al scenes con­sist of the same beats, track­ing the young women as they gath­er and dis­perse, gath­er and dis­perse. On the musi­cal front, with the excep­tion of a big num­ber with­in its first min­utes, the film’s first hour is almost entire­ly ded­i­cat­ed to exten­sive­ly lay­ing out a sto­ry that has already been made clear almost from the get-go, a tire­some stretch that dilutes the dra­mat­ic, grandiose poten­tial of the genre.

As it final­ly steps on the gas, The Wave at last ded­i­cates some time to prop­er­ly prod at the thorni­ness of trau­ma and denounce­ment, zoom­ing into Julia’s assault by fel­low stu­dent Max and the spi­ral of guilt and shame it sent her down­wards. Although the musi­cal sequences are wel­come as they at least add some dynamism to the repet­i­tive­ness of what came before, the music proves unin­spired and the lyrics exac­er­bate the tonal issues of the script. ​“Par­a­digm shift, no more stig­ma,” boasts Max, echoed by oth­er assailants and those who sup­port them in a sequence that is meant as satire but lands as bit­ter­ly as the mind­bog­gling­ly self-indul­gent num­ber that fol­lows, when Lelio goes meta to let the audi­ence knows that he is well aware there will be be agnos­tics when it comes to a man direct­ing a film about fem­i­nism and women’s rights.

But here’s the thing: the issue at hand is not as much that this is a man tack­ling con­ver­sa­tions around women’s bod­ies and polit­i­cal sis­ter­hood, but that the man in this case directs with such a grave mas­cu­line gaze and for­eign­ness to the com­plex­i­ties of wom­an­hood that what lingers is the sour taste that the call is com­ing from inside the house. South Amer­i­ca has the world’s high­est rates of misog­y­nis­tic vio­lence, with femi­cide rates grow­ing every year, and abor­tion is still large­ly ille­gal across the con­ti­nent. To have a high-pro­file South Amer­i­can direc­tor shine a light on the real-world impact of fem­i­nism in a con­ti­nent ungoverned by the intri­cate­ly Amer­i­can pol­i­tics of #MeToo is a heart­en­ing propo­si­tion, but, unfor­tu­nate­ly, it feels like The Wave doesn’t want you to empathise with the cause as much as it wants you to praise its director.