The editor’s note: “In Waves and War” originally debuted on Telluride Film Festival 2024. It opens at Laemmle Monica in Los Angeles Friday 3 October 2025 Before a Netflix debut on November 3.
Jon Shenk and Bonni CohenSometimes emotionally overwhelming documentary gets its title via a quotation from “The Odyssey” that opens the film.
“Now I’m used to suffering. I have endured so much in waves and war. Let this next adventure follow.”
The Navy seals that are the subjects “in waves and war” are not just used to suffering. Many people long thought it was their only option to bear the emotional costs of suffering. Several trips in Afghanistan and Iraq over years over years left invisible scars as a wall as visible, and PTSD can be so insurmountable an enemy, despite several therapies and prescription drugs, that much is left to think that only “carries it” is all they can do.
Shenk and CohenFilm makes a powerful case that there may be another alternative: psychedelic drugs, which are not approved for use in the United States, can help break through these veterinarians’ psychological barriers and offer a recovery. It makes the case so powerful that there are moments “in waves and war” feels almost like an advertisement: no disadvantage with these drugs, ibogaine and 5-meo-DMT, mentioned other than that they can help “crack you open” and meet your unresolved traumas and guilt and sorrow and then it was direct before you were before you can be found. It is unclear in the film how advisable this treatment – which usually involves veterinarians traveling to a clinic in Mexico to receive it – is for everyone. And maybe it’s not for everyone. But the key is that it gives hope.
The seals we meet in “In Waves and War” each had reached a point where they had given up on hope. Their stories about their years and years that fight abroad are away from their families for 300+ days a year and witness unthinkable horror constitute the film’s backbone. These are riveting stories. There is Marcus Capone, who is described a couple of times as an NFL Linebacker, but whose wife says had become “a monster” when he returned from several customs trips. He becomes the leading evangelist for psychedelic treatments for veterans through his basic veterinarians (veterans who explore treatment solutions) and is a producer on the film. DJ Shipley talks about how he met his wife, Patsy, who had a widow in the early 20th century when her first husband, Danny Dietz, was killed in 2005 in the Operation Red Wings crash in Afghanistan. Shipley wanted to visit Dietz’s grave to “ask him permission” to the Patsy court. But at the end of almost 20 years in the seals, he had almost destroyed the life he had built with her.
And finally, there is Matty Roberts, whose trip to Mexico to get his first treatment caught in “In waves and war.” Matty suffered a large wound in the arm under a fire fight and was convinced, initially, that his arm had been completely blown off. With animations from London-based commercial animation companies Studio AKA, each of these veterinarians comes to life. Animation style is fluid and limit -free, pictures just were made when transformed into something else: a helicopter floating over a dusty landscape; A number of seals in night vision glasses are approaching a goal; Fire replaced over a tractor tire. The images are as hazy as memory and a very effective way to get into the heads of these veterinarians-which otherwise tell their stories direct-to-camera and are never less than compulsory by doing so.
In particular, the animation falls the individualized experiences of going through the psychedelic treatment: for Marcus, it felt like he is flying through a void with memories from his life floating like a swirl of polaroids around him; For Matty, he ended up face to face and stared down a version of himself, as if he learned to confront and release his own ego.
It is all very meaningful to look at and never less than engaging, although “in waves and war” encounters as a pharmaceutical infomercial sometimes as much as a movie. Basically, Shenk and Cohen Trying to argue for a certain solution here, and it can really be promising, but it is also presented as a little too much of a silver bun for the questions they have identified. A more true, more valuable review of “In Waves and War” is one that will hopefully be written in a medical journal rather than indiewed. At least it offers hope for these American heroes that there may be more in life than “being used for suffering.”
Rating: B-
“In Waves and War” World premiered by 2024 Telluride Film Festival. It opens at Laemmle Monica in Los Angeles Friday 3 October 2025 Before a Netflix debut on November 3.
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