Film reviews: Whalefall | Forgotten Island | Case 137

A young diver trapped in the belly of a leviathan with only 24 hours of air? Whalefall should be a cracking thriller. Emphasis on ‘should’, writes Alistair Harkness​

Whalefall (15) ★★★

Forgotten Island (PG) ★★★

Case 137 (15) ★★★★

Based on co-writer Daniel Kraus’ own 2023 novel of the same name, Whalefall puts a survival movie spin on the story of Jonah and manages to deliver some spectacularly icky moments as its contemporary protagonist, Jay (Austin Abrams), is swallowed by a sperm whale.

That’s pretty much where the biblical allusions (and similarities to Pinocchio) end; as in the novel, the aforementioned ingestion by a whale is really the catalyst for a father-son story as Jay’s gnarly predicament forces him to recall the tough life-lessons imparted to him by his late father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), a grizzled scuba diver beloved in the local community, but hated by his own son for his emotionally abusive parenting style.

As the film opens we see the terminally ill Mitt cast himself into the ocean he loves instead of succumbing to the cancer that’s destroyed his lungs – a poetic, if somewhat narcissistic, act of self-sacrifice that leaves his bereft family with no closure of their own. Fast-forward a year and Jay returns home from college on the anniversary of Mitt’s death with a plan to retrieve his father’s bones from the ocean floor and finally lay the ghosts of the past to rest.

That’s a suitably grim starting point for the horror-movie-style scenario that follows and director Brian Duffield (who co-wrote the script with Kraus) is good at quickly sketching out these family dynamics before plunging us into the murky depths off the coast of California. Once underwater, the film wastes no time getting down to business. As Jay gets caught up in a tussle between a squid and a whale and finds himself pulled into the latter’s digestive tract, Abrams’ panicked performance, together with the claustrophobia-inducing effects work (the whale’s internal cavities are rendered with all the gloopy viscera of an Alien movie), ensures we’re fully immersed in his ordeal, with Duffield ratcheting up the ticking-clock tension with frequent frequent cut-aways to the rapidly depleting oxygen supply in Jay’s tank.

Danny Boyle’s survival thriller 127 Hours is a useful reference point here, but it’s actually another Boyle film, Slumdog Millionaire, that Whalefall starts to resemble as flashbacks to Jay’s hitherto unhappy interactions with his father miraculously provide him with the information he needs to survive. The book was structured in the same way, which made for a thrilling read, but no matter how good Brolin is at nailing Mitt’s taciturn machismo (and he is good), on screen it’s a little harder to buy into the more fanciful scenes in which the oxygen-deprived Jay has to commune with his dead dad via this leviathan from the deep. It starts to get a little goofy, in other words, and though well acted and full of suspense early on, the film never quite finds a way to reconcile its genre impulses with its dramatic ones.

Fusing the frenetic energy of K-Pop Demon Hunters, the pin-balling animation stylings of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and a plot that unexpectedly riffs on The Hangover and Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, DreamWorks’ big new animated adventure Forgotten Island is an odd amalgam of influences that’s simultaneously imaginative and exhausting.

Set in the Philippines in the mid-1990s, it revolves around mismatched BFFs Jo (R&B star H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano) as they’re sucked through a magical portal to a mythical island known as Katali on the eve before the college-bound Raissa is due to leave the directionless Jo for a new life in California. Waking up on a beach with no memory of the preceding 12 hours, they have to piece together what happened if they’re to have any hope of getting home – a quest that leads to encounters with a raft of characters drawn from Filipino folklore, among them a shape-shifting dog (voiced by Dave Franco) and a memory demon (Jenny Slate).

At heart it’s a film about the fragile bonds of friendship and how our collective memories make us who we are, a theme illustrated, ironically, by the extent to which this movie’s identity has been shaped by those aforementioned influences. Still, the vocal performances are engaging and the eye-popping visuals move the story along zippily enough.

Based on a true story, Case 137 sees French filmmaker Dominik Moll take on police malpractice as an internal affairs cop (Léa Drucke) investigates the shooting of a teenager during Paris’ Yellow Vest protests in 2018.

With the victim facing permanent brain damage and his family frustrated at the lack of accountability, what follows is a knotty procedural about the inner workings of the force amid budget cuts and intensifying social divisions, all tied together by the excellent Drucke’s morally complex turn as a conscientious cop trying to figure out if she’s going to have to bend the rules herself in order to hold her colleagues to account.

​All films in cinemas now

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