Roar Uthaug’s The Wave opens with documentary and news footage as a brief historical and scientific account of rockslides off the coasts of Norway. Natural shifts in the earth will create huge avalanches of rock which fall into the fjords below; when the amount of rock is significant enough, tsunamis are generated and crash into the coastal and mountainside communities. This technique is perhaps more direct in The Wave, but not unique to the disaster film genre—even the most preposterous entries, like The Day After Tomorrow or 2012, try their best to ground their events in some sort of reality. Without a “this could happen to you” approach, the genre simply wouldn’t exist.

What The Wave does differently than those modern disaster flicks draws it closer to the height of the 1970s mainstays. As production budgets and technical effects grew exponentially, so did the disaster film. Whereas The Poseidon Adventure and its contemporaries focused on one specific, limited event, we now see the parameters broadened to the masses. The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 are obvious examples, but even a recent earthquake film like San Andreas boasted, as Paul Giamatti gasped in the trailer, “That even though it’s happening here in California, you will feel it on the East coast.” As with all genres, there are obviously exceptions to the trends, with The Wave being a notable one. Through a small group of characters and an isolated event, the film is no less harrowing than its globe-trotting counterparts.

The film primarily follows Kristian [Kristoffer Joner] a geologist whose job is to monitor the conditions that could lead to a potential natural disaster. On his last day on the job before moving away from the fjord-side town, he comes to the realization that something catastrophic may be brewing and the size and scope may have been long underestimated. His wife Idun [Ane Dahl Torp] works at the ritzy hotel that accommodates the tourists who flock for the spectacular views. Separated from each other in the moments leading to the disaster, The Wave details their individual fights to survive and find each other again. This isn’t exactly a unique take on the disaster film, and some of the emotional beats may feel overused. But the intimate stakes really make for an intense experience.

Once the titular wave hits, it hits incredibly hard. This scene, which happens at the midpoint an hour into the film, is absolutely critical. Obviously, the disaster in a disaster film will always be important, but the limited specifics of The Wave make it especially so. Most disaster films either heavily focus on the moments during the natural disaster or the immediate aftermath, which for one reason or another is more dangerous for the characters. In The Poseidon Adventure, for example, we don’t really even see the disaster as it takes place. On the other hand, The Towering Inferno doesn’t really have any stakes without watching the fire blaze. The tsunami in The Wave comes and leaves quickly, leaving a mass of dead bodies and destruction, but without the increasingly dangerous puzzle room structure offered by films like The Poseidon Adventure.

That said, there is one extended survival sequence of the film and it is a classic one: a small group of people [here, Idun, her teenage son, and an unfortunate tourist] trap themselves in a confined space that quickly takes on rising water. The ultimate result of the scene is the most harrowing of the film—without completely spoiling it, a difficult decision for self-preservation is made, leading to one of the film’s few on-screen deaths. Kristian meets the wave more directly, the audience surrogate for the massive wonder and danger that the water represents. Trapped on the road to higher ground, Kristian survives with some quick thinking and luck [or, narrative necessity, you might say].

As someone who is genuinely, if irrationally, fearful of drowning or being caught in a flood, I found the thrills, however brief, of The Wave to be particularly frightening. It may have the same massive scale of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters, but it uses its limits smartly, allowing for a clearer narrative resonance. And when it has to deliver on the disaster, it goes all out, however briefly. Surrounded by scientific jargon [thankfully more realistic than the noted Roland Emmerich disasterpieces] and small character beats, The Wave packs an amazing punch at just the right time. For that, The Wave is a perfectly pitched, modest entry into its ever-growing genre.