For obvious reasons, The Waves of Madness is the first movie of its kind. Approximating a survival horror videogame circa the mid-‘90s, The Waves of Madness is a side-scrolling movie made with a small budget, intentionally cheesy acting, and a locked-in visual experiment keeping the framing two-dimensional. Add a fixing of Lovecraftian horror aboard a haunted ocean liner and you’ve got a thrilling indie experiment in form and function.
The blessing of making indie film is the freeform ability to experiment. Jason Trost seizes the opportunity with The Waves of Madness, which has been dubbed “the world’s first side-scrolling film,” but how does that go in practice?
It never feels like anything less than an inspired passion project. Scenes move two-dimensionally, laterally between rooms, up and down elevators, and the film works extra hard to maintain the static fixed perspectives of a certain generation of survival horror videogames. Likewise, the dialogue is straight out of a Resident Evil game, fumbling out of the characters just as pleasantly stilted and mechanical.
What happens is that Agent Legrasse (Jason Troust) is investigating a cult aboard an ocean liner and the Elderitch creatures controlling their minds have overtaken the ship. The liminal space between plain reality and the horror of the grotesque is thinner aboard the cruise ship. Within the ship’s fog-choked rooms, remnants of better times remain: old casino rooms, dining halls, and other fixtures of comfort replaced by dread.
On his journey, Legrasse, played smartly by the director himself, moves and operates by videogame logic. His movements are stunted and tank-like, just like a survival horror character would be. Likewise, he discloses very little personal information, we do not learn much about him, and he does not grow too much, because in a videogame, the growth is the context of the emergent world around you and the journey you have inside it. Growth becomes your agency and what you’ve learned about your immersive engagement within the game space.
So, The Waves of Madness works like this, too, and in most movies that would be challenging but the filmmaker’s clarity of execution just makes it all feel so charming. Like when Agent Legrasse comes across a young woman on board, Francis (Tallay Wickham), and won’t divulge even his name, but they strike up an unlikely and enjoyable companionship as they enter the mouth of madness.
As a secondary framing device, Legrasse divulges his experience to a therapist, Dr, Birkin (Ryan Gibson), which provides more wraparound context to make up for any lack of Ludonarrative engagement. This aspect also explores the film’s second component in its Lovecraftian themes (which resonate beyond the borrowed name of “Legrasse” from The Call of Cthulhu (1928).
It’s a slick production that uses its budget like a blunt weapon. Yeah, it’s all green-screened together in a studio (more likely a studio apartment than a film studio honestly), and it’s charming as hell. The lack of specialized effects show that money isn’t what sells ideas, but materially readable passion is.
That’s where The Waves of Madness excels and is so much better as something of a Resident Evil adaptation than most of those movies are. Because its characters act as if they’re in a videogame without sign-posting that it’s all a game. The film still holds its stakes alongside its novelty and never loses sight of its unique perspective or that it needs to keep moving through spaces to hold the whole thing together.
Credit where it’s due: Troust has made a passion project that resonates because the passion runs so deep into the very core of every choice made in the design of the movie. It’s not just empty novelty, either, as The Waves of Madness is full of good ideas and expends them readily, never outlasting its welcome or thrilling no-budget sense for innovation.