Cannes 2025: Magnificent Chilean Musical ‘The Wave’ is Empowering
by Alex Billington
May 26, 2025
The Cannes Film Festival is once again featuring a never-seen-before musical that will shock and surprise and dazzle audiences. Last year, Jacques Audiard’s ambitious (and eventually controversial) musical Emilia Perez premiered at Cannes. This year, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio’s new film The Wave premiered at Cannes – though not in the Main Competition. The Wave (originally called La Ola in Spanish) is another massively ambitious, audacious, vivid modern musical daring to sing & dance to songs about uncomfortable topics and challenging conversations. Lelio’s The Wave is inspired by the 2018 feminist protests at major universities in Chile that year, which were part of the global #MeToo movement (just before the pandemic arrived). It’s a story about one young woman named Julia, though it’s also a story about all women and how misogyny still rules in this patriarchal society. It’s an empowering movie about women standing up, fighting back, and never giving up until there is change. A magnificent creation! This shook me up & left me in awe.
La Ola is the latest feature directed by successful Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio – best known as the director of the acclaimed films Gloria (and its remake Gloria Bell), A Fantastic Woman, Disobedience, and The Wonder previously. The screenplay is written in collaboration featuring: Josefina Fernández, Manuela Infante, Paloma Salas, and director Sebastián Lelio. This evocative, eye-opening movie is a full-on musical with arresting Broadway-esque song and dance numbers – massive performances where the young cast of hundreds dances all around the university. It’s this year’s I’ve-never-seen-a-musical-that-does-this-before. I’ve noticed (often at film festivals) that too many people who do not like really like musicals try to watch musicals and then get upset that they’re musical. Stop doing this! The Wave is an exciting musical that tries to use song and dance to enhance the story it’s telling about this 2018 feminist movement in Chile. There are multiple songs about rape and sexual assault, accusations and the legal process, defying university rules and organizing protests, and what it’s like to be a woman in the world. It’s not an easy topic to address, but they go for it and they absolutely deliver – this hits hard and shakes things up in a fascinating way. Bravo, bravo!
The story follows actress / singer Daniela López as Julia, woman in the music department at a prestigious university in Santiago, Chile. After a night with another student goes wrong, she joins the protest movement speaking out against rape & sexual assault, because the school never really does much whenever it happens. La Ola makes a clever decision to make the core of the movie be about literally and metaphorically finding your voice. She is a singer and must learn to find her real voice as a singer, but she’s also a young woman who must find her voice in this movement, learning to speak out as a feminist and also fight for real change. Especially as someone caught up in an incident. All of the musical numbers and all of the choreography is awesome – from the way hundreds of students dance as a “wave”, to the more intimate performances when the song about accusations kicks in. Perhaps another musical has done it before, but I was in awe watching them dance out their protest, putting on masks and taking over the university while singing & cheering. This movie will impress anyone who already knows & loves musicals, it’s the kind of show-stopping spectacular that would get Tony awards if it were playing on Broadway. (And maybe it will show up there one day soon.)
Lelio actually does take a pause to address the elephant in the room – at one point during the big finale, the movie literally stops mid song & breaks the fourth wall. “Why is this movie being directed by a white man?” they ask, since it’s supposed to be all about women taking charge and making the world better and safer for women. Alas the film quickly moves on after this beat, despite posing this intriguing question. What’s most refreshing is that the movie doesn’t actually have all of the answers. There is no conclusion to all of what is going on in this, it’s not simply “well this is what we need to do and that’s it, we’ve done it!” The world isn’t really better yet, unfortunately. But I will reiterate that it is vitally important & extraordinarily empowering that this movie even exists at all. These protests in 2018 (and around the world) happened, and even if they didn’t exactly change everything, this movie captures them for the sake of history. It will always be known that these badass young ladies walked out, took major risks, courageously challenged the system, and fought back – and that is amazing. And it is just as amazing that they were able to translate this story into such a creative, revolutionary, awe-inspiring musical using the power of cinema to immortalize these brave women.
Alex’s Cannes 2025 Rating: 8.5 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing
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