Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave is a turbulent and grueling documentary about a time of panic and pathos, and it comes to us about a year and a half after the events that it depicts. To cover the first onslaught of Covid-19 in New York City from March to June 2020, Heineman embedded his crew at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens. The footage they captured reveals not just the haggling over personal protective equipment or availability of beds that dominated national news coverage, but the close-up immediacy of nurses and doctors fighting to save patients from a disease that they didn’t fully understand.
To ensure that the size and scope of the pandemic’s early stage doesn’t overwhelm his more intimate story, Heineman maintains a tight focus on a small knot of people as they navigate a terrifying situation. The result is similarly structured as but slightly broader in scope than Hao Wu and Wiexi Chen’s 76 Days. By tracking patients and medical staff through the tumult of an overwhelmed facility, The First Wave successfully emphasizes how people’s emotions were whipsawed by an unprecedented crisis. Many of the early scenes are pulse-racing depictions of medical teams swathed in gowns and masks battling to keep patients alive and their own fear and uncertainty at bay. In one scene, a patient pulls through after a team puts in an all-out effort to save them only to then crash and die not long after.
Among the key subjects of Heineman’s documentary is Nathalie Douge, a Haiti-born doctor who describes how the only way to get through that kind of situation is to “separate myself.” But it’s a survival instinct that she has a hard time following through on. For one, the look in the physician’s eyes when she hears a gut-wrenching wailing on the phone after relaying news of a patient’s death to their family shows that she’s hardly separated.
Other medical staff in The First Wave don’t have much more success than Douge. Watching the slow progress of Ahmed Ellis, an NYPD school safety officer who spends much of the film barely conscious, a nurse says with an exhausted bluntness, “I need him to do well.” Because families have to be kept out of the hospital and the patients are frequently unresponsive, the staff become intermediaries of tearful messages, further wearing them down.
The documentary spends most of its time either in the hospital or at the homes of the patients’ families. This creates a continuing series of emotional crescendos as The First Wave moves through the spring, Covid cases keep piling up, and patients struggle to breathe on their own, much less recover. There’s no overarching narration or on-screen titles: Heineman frames the progression of the pandemic with occasional montages of news footage or clips of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s speech-filled news conferences (whose tone of ostentatious self-regard was off-putting at the time and reads even more so in a film so filled with sacrifice). An opening shot of a misty Manhattan skyline is backgrounded by a roaring tide of squawking, harried first responder radio traffic that communicates the anxiety and dread sweeping through the city as people were locked down and mass graves were being dug.
Those disease-driven anxieties are further amplified when The First Wave tracks the protests over George Floyd’s death that May. Eerie aerial shots of empty streets are followed by overhead images of marching crowds and skirmishes between police and protestors. Douge, who earlier in the film said that it pained her to see how many Covid patients were people of color like herself, joins the protests wearing a sign that reads, “Racism is a public health issue.”
With its unrelenting tightrope pacing, The First Wave can make for harrowing viewing. But the conclusion still carries with it some deserved sense of triumph that feels authentic. Patients leave the hospital amid crowds of cheering workers and sobbing relatives. Families gather back together. The lights are turned off in the now-empty surge ward. Even so, the film maintains a sense of toughened realism: As the hospital empties, a doctor warns the exhausted staff, “Let’s be ready for a resurgence.” It’s hard not to feel that it was probably for the best that the people in the film likely didn’t know how many waves were still to come.
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