“Between Two Waves” is Not Your Average Haunted House Flick
Sibling relationships are often fraught. Two people can live in the same house and yet experience their adolescent years in entirely different ways. The divide can be even more intense when those siblings are twins. Directed by Courtney Sposato and Mark Sposato, Between Two Waves is, at its core, a film about a family and what happens inside the four walls of a house that is meant to be a home. Blending supernatural elements with grounded familial tension, Between Two Waves is a pressure cooker of generational trauma manifested in the story of a haunted house.
Cass (Koko Marshall) has left her childhood in the rearview mirror. In early home movies, the audience can see that she was never the favorite child, or even really given the time of day by her mother. Instead, all of her mother’s attention is focused on Cass’ twin, Tate (Dave Coleman). While Cass was sent away and ignored, Tate was the apple of their mother’s eye. Decades later, the mother has passed away and the twins return to their childhood home to deal with the aftermath. What begins as a run-of-the-mill consolidation of a person’s belongings turns into a fight for their lives.
“The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.” It’s a line from the T.S. Eliot poem Little Gidding, and we see it on the opening title cards of Between Two Waves. From the beginning, these lines give the audience an understanding that things are different in this world for these siblings. That whatever journey we go on here will be an exploration of life’s cyclical nature. There are patterns that arise in families and relationships that work their way into grooves, into generational molds that solidify through the years.
courtesy of Between Two Waves
Between Two Waves was shot over the course of thirteen days on a micro-budget. For all its restrictions, the film never feels small. The special effects are smartly threaded throughout the film, used sparingly to cultivate a genuine sense of dread within this home. Between Two Waves is proof that so much can be done with just a little if there’s purposeful intention. The audience learns about the stakes and the dynamic between the twins and their mother, not from any of the supernatural elements, but from the fact that even though Tate had a somewhat happy relationship with his mother, he refuses to enter her bedroom. Between Two Waves is open about its micro-budget nature, but it’s so well-disguised that the reality of their production might not register with the people at home.
“Where are you right now?” asks Cass’ friend at the beginning of the film. Between Two Waves wanders through time and uses the familial home as a means of exploring how our memories can fail us or remind us that we must continue to go forward. The script’s central conflict is the lingering power of generational trauma, how it twists itself into people, and the concerted effort that goes into untangling oneself from it. Between Two Waves is a familial drama sifted through a psychological thriller and it’s through this combination that the film is able to reach new heights.
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