Having seen this film on the coincidental same day as the lead actress' Inka Kallen's birthday, 30.09.2024, (when it was broadcast nationally in Australia on SBS World Movies channel), I consider it my pleasure to have this opportunity to supply a review hopefully drafted to counter the examples of bitter kneejerk detritus being offered as though representations in some way of actual and worthy summations of this film, which indeed, they are not!
The very fact that The Wait has roused within some self styled reviewers such viscerally angry responses explains volumes about the film's actual subtext and stands as a reflection of the evocative power this portrayal of complex human relationships exhibits.
What to the undiscerning may appear superficially as a simple story displaying the abjectly gratuitous, is very much more than that, despite thse aspects being explicitly suggested, their purpose is not to merely to excite and titilate the jaded, but to reflect the catharsis undergone within the emotional states of the beings here depicted.
Through recognition and application of the consideration the title requests of its audience, its narrative may be permitted to unfold, as it is a story requiring meditation upon the otherwise hidden motivations for each of these characters actions to reveal precisely what the title suggests this film about-that pause required to actually have an understanding of ourselves and others.
In essence, one character has been waiting for a love denied and dferred, but has decided to try to forget and instead accept being loved in expectation that if they wait then their own love will reciprocate this.
One is prepared to wait, despite the other not loving them as they do, upon the higher power of Love to fulfill what is lacking in their self, in others and in the one they love.
The other has acted without waiting, expecting the immediate fulfillment and reciprocation of a love they refused and that they are left to realise they have lost by neglecting and which they may now wait the rest of their life to find revealed... if ever.
There is vastly more to this film than I may attempt to explain only a few short hours after watching.
The Wait is a description of the conflict which comes when the residues of past decisions are forced by circumstance into confrontation with one another and what they are transformed into by that confrontation. It is a treatise on what it truly means to love.
Love, neglect, faithfulness, desire, penitance, revenge and forgiveness, these subjects are rarely confronted in modern film with the type of deeply contemplative rendering which The Wait displays in its narrative.
Like the sea, forest and sky so effortlessly depicted and accompanying this story with the presnce of a fourth lead player, what brews deep beneath and inside these elements has been hidden from us by The Wait, unless we choose to explore and hunt, seeking to find what lies within.
If you choose to, then you will find it worth the wait.
