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DIRECTED BY: Jason Trost

FEATURING: Jason Trost, Tallay Wickham, Ryan Gibson

PLOT: Agent LeGrasse is charged with investigating a distress signal from an ocean liner which has veered off course into the center of the Spacecraft Cemetery.

COMMENTS: A throwaway line at the start of The Waves of Madness reveals a great deal in hindsight. Ambling drunkenly to the bar on a massive ocean liner, a passenger seeks a final drink for the night—some Scotch—and is mistakenly served rum. No matter, he assures the embarrassed bartender, “It’s all going to the same place.” Little does our tippler know: it is indeed. Every single passenger, all of them doomed.

Jason Trost wastes no time laying down the story and style in The Waves of Madness, a tight little bit of Lovecraftian adventure that appears to be the launch of his next recurring movie universe. We quickly meet Agent LeGrasse, a professional working under the direction of an unspecified global organization. “The Elders of the Sea” (an ominously christened vessel if ever there was one) has an emergency—one so dire that its distress signal explicitly advises against anyone coming to the rescue. Despite this, LeGrasse boats over, docks his craft, and explores the floating derelict with nothing but his handgun, a few flash-bang grenades, and backpack stuffed with “Plan B.”

Anyone familiar with survival horror video games and  side-scrollers will immediately observe Trost’s inspiration. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen lateral camera movement packed so densely anywhere else. Trost nails ‘game logic,’ too, adding to the experience. LeGrasse discovers an in-g̶a̶m̶e̶ -movie clue about how light can stop the menace, and before a pivotal bit of actioneering, counts aloud to determine how many seconds he has to enact a tricky maneuver. There’s even what appears to be a escort mission (and like most gamers, LeGrasse wants nothing to do with that); but this ends up being part of an underlying ambiguity explored more thoroughly through the three timelines that concurrently unfold as our jaded agent delves deeper into the mystery.

Trost knows his roots in the gaming world—and has now provided evidence beyond the delightfully ridiculous foray into epic levels of DDR in his FP saga. The Waves of Madness isn’t groundbreaking. We’ve seen most of these pieces before: lost cruise ship, strange cult doings, mysterious eldritch entities, hard-boiled gunman, and so on. But the director (and screen-writer, and producer, and one of the soundtrack musicians…) has distilled his various inspirations into a pleasingly particular experience, which will click on all the nostalgia switches for many viewers—and hopefully inspire others to investigate what it is Trost is celebrating.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…as the strong-jawed, eye-patched, laconic Legrasse wanders through this seaborne hellscape as though he were trapped in a Thirties horror adventure or a surreal noir – even though he comes with technology (mobile phones, digital downloads, a portable ‘nuke’) very much from our own age – his own past, present and future become similarly confounded…The highly mannered nature of Legrasse’s experiences on the ship has the viewer too constantly questioning their reality… this is hokey retro fun, turning one man’s trauma into genre-bound pandemonium, and reinterpreting cinema’s fantasy worlds as (un)safe spaces for drifitng pyches [sic] to explore.”–Anton Bitel, Projected Figures (contemporaneous) 

Where to watch The Waves of Madness