Out of sight, in the inky abyss, nature’s greatest battle has never been caught on camera. In an awesome, ominous, goosebump-plucking recreation, Whalefall brings us face-to-face with a sperm whale hunting a giant squid in the chasm of Monterey Bay. For scuba diver Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams), it’s a case of wrong place, wrong time, wrong dinner. Lassoed by a lashing tentacle, he’s dragged into the leviathan’s maw.
For sheer, intense spectacle, that set-piece alone will rip you a new blowhole, even if it is biologically dubious. They may have traffic-cone teeth and a jaw like a drawbridge, but a sperm whale’s gullet isn’t much wider than a dinner plate. Still, why let science get in the way of a good movie? Whalefall is unlike anything you’ll see this year.
How Jay came to be lunch is mapped out from the get-go. After his estranged dad commits suicide by drowning, Jay dives down to rescue his remains in an act of closure — and gets enclosed in the most hellish place imaginable. What unfolds is a kind of biological escape room as Jay relies on his wits to keep him alive (shout out to the luminous jellyfish cast in the unlikely role of Cast Away’s Wilson).
Lit in sickly phosphorescent green, the artillery drum of a colossal heart counting down like a booming clock, this is body-horror writ large: a Lovecraftian nightmare of ooze, pump and heaving flesh, lung-crushingly claustrophobic, deliberately disorientating and, for a Hollywood film, bracingly avant-garde.
No other film looks, sounds or feels remotely like it.
Taking a leaf from solo survival classic 127 Hours, Whalefall breaks from the horror through Jay’s flashbacks to his dad, an alpha-male seadog and savage idealist played by Josh Brolin with a face like a clenched fist. The whale, of course, comes to symbolise Jay’s suffocating relationship with him.
Brian Duffield’s last film, the ingenious near-silent alien-invasion drama No One Will Save You, feels like a blueprint here. Scuba regulator clamped in his mouth, Abrams — who only recently attempted to escape an outbreak of Raccoon City’s infected mutants in Resident Evil — is mute for long stretches, enduring squid bites, stomach-acid burns and perforated eardrums, the fear and desperation played out in the eyes.
If it’s not already obvious, here’s a movie committed to taking wild creative swings, culminating in Brolin’s spirit barking guidance like a grumpy Jedi ghost. Hard to swallow? Maybe, but the risk pays off with a surprisingly poignant closing shot. Occasionally, the father-son flashbacks stall the momentum of survival, but Whalefall is a gutsy response to those claiming Hollywood is out of ideas: no other film looks, sounds or feels remotely like it. Take a deep breath and dive in.