The wound you can’t see: on “In Waves and War”
There’s a whole genre of psychedelic films that all look roughly the same – barefoot people, a sunset, someone playing a handpan, someone else explaining that everything is one. This film is the opposite of that.
“In Waves and War” is a documentary by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August 2024 and landed on Netflix in November 2025. It follows three former Navy SEALs – Marcus Capone, Matty Roberts and DJ Shipley – from enlisting after 9/11, through the training and the deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, and into the part nobody films: coming home.
Behind the Tattoos, a broken mind
The men in this film aren’t victims in the usual sense. They volunteered, they excelled, some of them are highly decorated. But after years of repeated blast exposure, long separations from family, and things they don’t bring up over dinner, something inside them wore down. Traumatic brain injury, PTSD, depression, rage, memory problems, marriages falling apart. Some of them reached a point where they thought about ending it.
Standard treatment didn’t work. Capone was on high doses of medication and only got worse. It was his wife, Amber, who eventually found the unlikely alternative: a clinic in Mexico that treats people with ibogaine.
What happens down there
Ibogaine is an alkaloid extracted from Tabernanthe iboga, a shrub that grows in West Africa and has been used there in ritual practice for generations. In the US it’s a Schedule I substance, completely prohibited, which is why the trip to Mexico. The experience runs for many hours, and the men describe it not as a trip but as watching a film of their own lives from a different angle. A few days later comes the second stage: 5-MeO-DMT, the compound secreted by a toad, which lasts only minutes and is described as something else entirely.
Rather than staging any of this with actors, the directors rendered it in animation (by Studio AKA), with a different visual language for each of the three men. It’s one of the best decisions in the film. It sidesteps the kitsch and still manages to convey something of what actually happened in there.
What I saw
I watched In Waves and War, and it really moved me. This isn’t another cliché about tree-hugging hippies. These are some of the toughest men in the world, and they were wounded mentally during the war in Afghanistan. Behind the shell of muscle, tattoos, beards, and a decorated past in the teams, there’s a delicate, injured psyche. The iboga and the toad produced a dramatic change from the very first session. It sounds so surprising, but you can’t argue with the facts. I’d recommend this film to everyone, not necessarily to people interested in psychedelics, but simply to anyone. A real film: moving, direct, no manipulation.
And the science?
This is where the film gets genuinely interesting, because it doesn’t rest on testimony alone. Thirty of the veterans who made the trip were assessed by the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab under Dr. Nolan Williams, and the results were published in Nature Medicine in January 2024. The protocol, called MISTIC, pairs the ibogaine with magnesium in an attempt to protect the heart.
The numbers are stark. Average functional disability dropped from 30.2 before treatment to 5.1 a month after, moving the group from mild-to-moderate disability to a score considered no disability at all. PTSD, depression and anxiety measures fell sharply too, and the effect held through the full follow-up period.
Now the caveats, because without them this is an ad rather than an article. The study was observational, not controlled. There was no control group, no placebo, and the participants chose to travel and pay for the treatment themselves. That means expectation, hope and a sense of brotherhood are all baked into the result and can’t be separated out. Ibogaine is also a dangerous compound: it has been linked to fatal cardiac arrhythmias, which is why it isn’t something anyone should be trying on their own. Capone himself says plainly in the film that it didn’t cure him. It gave him a blank canvas, and whatever gets painted on it has to be built afterward, day by day.
What’s happened since
The film turned into a political instrument fast. In Texas it was screened for state legislators, and $50 million was subsequently approved for clinical research into ibogaine, the largest state investment of its kind in the US. In March 2026 the state announced it would launch its own research program after no pharmaceutical company met the conditions it had set. In April 2026 an executive order was signed to accelerate research into psychedelic compounds for serious mental illness, including federal money for partnerships with states.
Put differently, what was a decade ago the business of grey-zone border clinics is now on its way into formal clinical trials.
Why it’s worth watching
“In Waves and War” works because of the men, not the molecules. Its strongest moment isn’t the hallucination but the conversations between them, enormous guys talking about love and fear without apologizing for it. One of them says he feels bad for anyone who’s never had a moment like that with a group of grown men. That’s what they lost when they left the teams, and part of what they found again.
The closing credits carry a note for anyone struggling with suicidal thoughts, pointing to wannatalkaboutit.com. It suits the film: direct, no drama, no music underneath it.
