Movies Like The Wave
If you loved The Wave's Drama and Thriller storytelling, these films deliver a similar experience — carefully selected for tone, themes, and emotional depth. Each pick includes where to watch it right now.
★ Top Picks
The Experiment
20 men are chosen to participate in the roles of guards and prisoners in a psychological study that ultimately spirals out of control.
Dirty Teacher
When a high school senior discovers her teacher is seducing her boyfriend, events turn deadly after the teacher tries to cover it up.
Experimenter
Yale University, 1961. Stanley Milgram designs a psychology experiment that still resonates to this day, in which people think they’re delivering painful electric shocks to an affable stranger strapped into a chair in another room. Despite his pleads for mercy, the majority of subjects don’t stop the experiment, administering what they think is a near-fatal electric shock, simply because they’ve been told to do so. With Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial airing in living rooms across America, Milgram strikes a nerve in popular culture and the scientific community with his exploration into people’s tendency to comply with authority. Celebrated in some circles, he is also accused of being a deceptive, manipulative monster, but his wife Sasha stands by him through it all.
Reality
Augusta, Georgia, United States, June 3, 2017. After running some errands, Reality Winner returns home, where she is approached by two men.
Won't Back Down
Jamie Fitzpatrick and Nona Alberts are two women from opposites sides of the social and economic track, but they have one thing in common: a mission to fix their community's broken school and ensure a bright future for their children. The two women refuse to let any obstacles stand in their way as they battle a bureaucracy that's hopelessly mired in traditional thinking, and they seek to re-energize a faculty that has lost its passion for teaching.
Fingernails
Anna and Ryan have found true love together. It's been proven by a controversial test. There's just one problem: Anna still isn't sure. Then she meets Amir.
Three Christs
Dr. Alan Stone breaks new ground for treatment of the mentally ill through an experiment on three paranoid schizophrenic patients who believe they are Jesus Christ.
More Movies Like The Wave
Bad Sister
As a top student at St. Adeline's Catholic Boarding School, Zoe senses that something is not quite right about the school's new nun-- a sense proven to be true when it is revealed the "good' nun is an imposter with a fatal attraction to Zoe's brother.
The Magic of Ordinary Days
Pregnant out of wedlock, an educated young woman is pressured by her father into an arranged marriage with a lonely farmer in this drama set during WWII.
Rogue Agent
Conman Robert Freegard poses as an undercover MI5 agent and kidnaps countless victims amidst a high-stakes manhunt, until the woman who fell for him brings him to justice.
Miller's Girl
A talented young writer embarks on a creative odyssey when her teacher assigns a project that entangles them both.
7 Days in Hell
A fictional documentary-style expose on the rivalry between two tennis stars who battled it out in a 1999 match that lasted seven days.
Georgetown
Ulrich Mott is an eccentric and versatile social climber with grandiose plans to affect United States foreign policy. Encouraged in his attempts by his strategically chosen (and much older) wife, the well-connected journalist Elsa Brecht, Mott has a knack for making himself indispensable and impossible to ignore. The only one seemingly immune to his charms is Elsa's daughter Amanda, who might simply disapprove of her mother marrying a much younger man - or perhaps she senses something more sinister beneath the smooth-talking surface?
Infidelity in Suburbia
With her husband away at work, and her son at school, Laura dreams of a home-renovation project to supplant her restless days. Elliott, her irresistibly hot private contractor, soon fulfills her more forbidden dreams.
Iron Jawed Angels
Defiant young activists take the women's suffrage movement by storm, putting their lives at risk to help American women win the right to vote.
Cadet Kelly
Hyperactive teenager Kelly is enrolled into a military school when her new stepfather becomes the Commandant. At first she has problems fitting in and taking orders until she tries out for the drill team.
Oslo
The true story of negotiations between implacable enemies — the secret back-channel talks, unlikely friendships and quiet heroics of a small but committed group of Israelis, Palestinians and one Norwegian couple that led to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords.
All Together Now
An optimistic, talented teen clings to a huge secret: she's homeless and living on a school bus. When tragedy strikes, can she learn to accept a helping hand?
Sound of My Voice
A journalist and his girlfriend get pulled in while they investigate a cult whose leader claims to be from the future.
Why These Movies Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with The Wave (1981): Drama and Thriller themes, similar narrative structure, and comparable emotional depth. NoBadPicks uses a combination of TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface films most likely to resonate with fans of The Wave.
See full details for The Wave (1981)