94 min | R | November 19, 2021 | National Geographic Documentary Films
A camera follows the doctors and nurses inside a Queens hospital during the first weeks of COVID, when nobody knows what works and the bodies keep coming. It films people doing the impossible job with no script and no end date. The result is the closest thing to standing in that room.
The First Wave drops the viewer inside Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens during the spring of 2020. New York is the epicenter. The hospital fills past capacity. The film tracks the staff and a handful of patients across four months as the disease overwhelms a system that was never built for it. This is not a movie about a virus. It is a movie about the people who stand between the virus and the dead, and what that costs them.
Dr. Nathalie Dougé carries the human center of the film. She treats the sick, loses patients she fights for, and reckons with the fact that the dead are disproportionately Black and Latino like her own family. Kellie Wunsch works the floor as a nurse whose exhaustion becomes its own character. Brussels Jabon is the patient the film returns to, a young woman intubated for weeks while her husband Naph and sister Athens wait outside for any word. The film names them as people, not statistics, and refuses to let their faces become a montage. Their fear is specific and their small recoveries are earned.
Matthew Heineman directs with the embedded vérité method he built on his earlier frontline work, and the absence of a credited screenwriter is the point. There is no narrator and no talking-head interview to explain what you are seeing. The cinematography moves with handheld urgency through hallways crowded with ventilators and prone bodies, then holds still on a single masked face long enough to find the person under the PPE. The editing intercuts the medical chaos with the protests over George Floyd erupting outside, drawing a line between who fills the hospital beds and who fills the streets. The sound design lets the beeping monitors and the muffled voices through masks carry the dread without a score telling you how to feel.
What makes the film land is its refusal to flinch and its refusal to exploit. Heineman could have built a horror movie out of this footage. Instead he builds a record of endurance, where the camera sits in the silence after a death and the staff keep moving because the next patient is already crashing. The film captures a moment the country was already eager to forget while it was still happening. It insists that you remember the faces, and it earns the right to ask that of you.