A passable imitation of a Hollywood disaster movie minus the campy elements, Norway’s “The Wave” takes place in a lakeside village that lives under the doomy shadow of a mountain that threatens to crumble and cause a killer tsunami.

Geologist Kristian (Kristoffer Joner) is a familiar movie type: The Cassandra pleading for attention to a calamity only he can see coming. Just as he is moving his family out of their house high above the mountain lake and into a hotel at sea level in preparation for a new job, the equipment that is monitoring cracks in the rock begins to get jittery. Meanwhile, his family gets split up and his teen son goes missing on a skateboarding jaunt just as things get damp.

Advances in digital effects mean even a Norwegian budget ($6 million or so) can whip up a reasonably tasty tsunami, and the character foundations of the film are solid. But “The Wave,” competent as it is, lacks the heart-rending power of the similar 2012 tsunami movie “The Impossible.”