Whalefall
Directed by Brian Duffield
Written by Brian Duffield and Daniel Kraus
Starring Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, and a really big whale
Classification PG; 106 minutes
Opens in theatres Oct. 16
Critic’s Pick
A lot can be forgiven of a movie if more than half of it is set inside the belly of a whale. What’s that? You think you might have just endured a stroke and thought for a moment that you read the words, “inside the belly of a whale”? Well, I have good news: You are not dying. Even better news: The new movie Whalefall does indeed largely take place in the digestive guts of a sperm whale. And it’s fantastic.
Adapted from the 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus, director Brian Duffield’s new film is an absurdly entertaining mix of family melodrama, survivalist thriller, and exceptionally gooey horror flick, taking an absurd concept and infusing it with just enough whiffs of environmental and biological realism to do for the bays of Monterey, Calif., what Jaws did for the beaches of New England. You will simply never scuba-dive again, if you even dared to dream of such a thing in the first place. You might also be permanently put off the concept of seafood.
Such a ludicrous adventure of course requires a compelling hero, and Austin Abrams is the perfect piece of meat.20th Century Studios./Supplied
So, how exactly do you make a film about being stuck inside a whale? First, you abandon any Biblical mention of Jonah or allusions to Herman Melville, and you craft a movie less about the hows and whys of whale physiology and more about the fractured bonds between father and son. Stick with me.
In the opening few minutes of Whalefall, we’re introduced to our two key characters: father Mitt (Josh Brolin) and his twentysomething son Jay (Austin Abrams). Mitt is a grizzled lover of the sea and expert scuba-diver suffering from lung cancer, and Jay can’t stand anything to do with his sometimes unhinged father, departing home for college before the old man can kill himself by drowning off the coast of Monterey.
A year after Mitt’s death, though, Jay has returned to his family (including Elisabeth Shue, in a thankless role as his mom), determined to recover his father’s skeletal remains from the ocean floor. And so he straps on his scuba gear under the cover of night, ignores local rumblings of whales spotted near the shore, and then gets ... well, slurped up by a gigantic whale. (To be fair to the whale, Jay simply got caught up in the tentacles of a gigantic squid that the creature was pursuing. This isn’t a malevolent fella.)
Once inside the beast, Jay is faced with an extreme ticking-clock scenario: Can he somehow escape the creature’s innards before his oxygen tank runs empty, or will he become just another piece of chum?
Cutting between Jay’s torturous experience and flashbacks to slightly sunnier times between him and his taciturn dad, Duffield’s film dodges and weaves around all the magnificent narrative and visual challenges that it sets up for itself. Thanks to a nearly seamless mix of practical and visual effects, Jay’s predicament feels both patently absurd and viscerally real, with Duffield amping up the claustrophobia to conjure an entirely new kind of cinematic nightmare. We’ve simply never seen an environment like this, squishy and horrifying and, presumably, more or less reflective of the natural world.
Austin Abrams as twentysomething Jay Gardiner and Josh Brolin as Jay's father, Mitt Gardiner, in Whalefall.Jennifer Clasen/Supplied
The eye-popping, jaw-dropping environs help the story’s frequent dips into the past feel less conventional and more deeply appreciated, like essential emotional respites. The scenes between Mitt and Jay are far from groundbreaking in the father-son tensions that they explore, but you’ll be clinging onto the memory of them for dear life once the movie plunges you back into Jay’s contemporary predicament. Which, again, is about a man trapped inside the belly of a whale, for goodness sake.
Such a ludicrous adventure of course requires a compelling hero, and Abrams – who went through a similarly horrifying ordeal of solitary terror in last month’s Resident Evil – is the perfect piece of meat. Wide-eyed and clever, though obviously not clever enough to, you know, avoid the gaping maw of a whale, Abrams’s real-life Pinocchio guides us into a seeming point of no return without sacrificing that necessary glimmer of hope. You want him to survive not only because that means he can make postmortem amends with his father, but because you’re curious just how the hell he’s supposed to get back to the surface, anyway.
Hold your breath for as long as you can, and everything whale be alright.