Planning to take a quick jaunt into a cave, a phone booth, a coffin, an escape room, or a spaceship—or to saunter onto a ski lift before a snowstorm or between a literal rock and a hard place? Watch out! If you’re an attractive actor, there is a good chance you’ll get stuck there for the duration of an unbearably tense feature film.
But while beautiful bold-faced names have been trapped in all manner of unlikely locales—a luxury apartment! Stanford University! Hugh Grant’s house!—there’s never been a movie about a hot guy who gets swallowed by a whale. Until now.
Whalefall stars Austin Abrams as Jay, a hapless college student and reluctant scuba diver who embarks on a cursed voyage into the briny deep. While searching for the remains of his dead father (Josh Brolin, giving Quint from Jaws if Quint went to the gym a lot), Jay inadvertently finds himself swept into the gargantuan maw of a sperm whale. He’s got a broken rib and less than an hour’s worth of oxygen in his tank. What happens next?
If you want to experience Whalefall for yourself—and honestly, you should; it’s one of the best times I’ve had at a movie theater this fall—you should ideally read no further. If, however, you’re unbearably curious about how this high-concept survival movie plays out, avast, me hearties: Let me answer some questions you may have.
Okay, so: How exactly does one get swallowed by a whale?
In this case, it happens by accident. The whale is trying to eat a giant squid—no, not one played by Laura Linney—and Jay just happens to be in the wrong place (near the squid) at the wrong time (breakfast).
Could this ever actually happen?
At least two people in recent memory really have been swallowed by whales, according to a cursory Google search, though neither of them went all the way down the whale’s throat.
Why can’t Jay just get out through the whale’s mouth, like those guys did?
Umm, because he gets fully swallowed? You try climbing up a whale’s esophagus. The true villain of Whalefall is peristalsis.
But how does Jay survive being eaten in the first place? Wouldn’t the whale chew him up?
It would not! Sperm whales have sharp conical teeth on their lower jaw but no upper teeth, and they do not chew their food.
Fine. But do most whales have a post-throat, pre-stomach room where a guy can just hang out for a while?
Sort of? Sperm whales are related to even-toed ungulates like cows and hippos, and like those two animals, they have several-chambered stomachs. The first chamber has muscular walls that squeeze the food to break it down into smaller pieces. Jay manages to avoid this fate, because if he didn’t, Whalefall would be a very short movie. For what it’s worth, director Brian Duffield told The Hollywood Reporter that the film’s team “did our best to make it as scientifically accurate as possible.”
Can Jay breathe once he’s inside the whale?
No. Though there’s air in there, it’s toxic, because it’s mostly methane. Luckily, Jay’s oxygen tank survives the journey to the center of the whale.
How can he see inside the whale?
Bioluminescence, baby! The creature’s first stomach chamber is filled not just with Jay, but with ocean life that gives off its own light. That is more of a deep-sea thing, and Jay is not that far under the surface when he gets swallowed—but let’s allow for a bit of poetic license.
Does he form a relationship with any of these bioluminescent creatures?
Yes. Jay briefly fraternizes with a jellyfish that he then uses as a flashlight. Imagine Wilson the volleyball, but with tentacles.
How long is Jay inside the whale?
Once the swallowing has occurred, Whalefall unfolds more or less in real time—an hour-ish—as we watch Jay make several escape attempts. At one point, he descends into the stomach’s second chamber, somehow unaware that acid is not a pleasant substance in which to bathe. At another, he nearly makes it out of the whale’s mouth again, notices a nearby whale-watching boat, and futilely screams, in its general direction, “Help! I’m in the fucking whale!” None of this works, of course, until his final, Hail Mary attempt.
Would it be possible for Jay to exit through the blowhole?
I’m not going to dignify that with a response.
What about the whale’s other end?
Putting aside the whole stomach-acid thing, a large sperm whale’s intestines are more than 150 meters long—nearly 500 feet. That may not sound like much in the context of a studio apartment, but it would present quite a challenge to a man in flippers.
Would you say this story is more like Pinocchio, or more like the biblical saga of Jonah and the whale?
Neither. It’s like the movie where Blake Lively makes friends with a seagull.
And yet it’s based on a novel by a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer.
That’s not a question, but yes: Whalefall is an adaptation of the 2023 novel of the same name by Daniel Kraus, who won the Pulitzer for fiction this spring. (For a book with no whales.)
Does Moby Dick ever get mentioned in Whalefall?
Surprisingly, it does not.
But is this whale a metaphor?
Yes and no. I can’t stress enough that Jay is swallowed by a literal whale. While he’s in there, though, he’s also processing the death of his difficult father. As his oxygen dwindles, he starts hallucinating the voice of his father, played by Brolin, and gradually finds closure and the strength to survive his unusual ordeal. Eventually, Brolin starts speaking not only as Jay’s father, but also as the creature that has swallowed Jay. As a friend of mine put it, “The whale is actually your dad that sucks.”
Are you telling me this is really a movie about trauma?
It’s about grief, which is totally different. It’s also sorta-kinda about humans ruining the whales’ natural habitat. In an early flashback scene, Brolin says that there are too many boats in the bay, which are “making the whales go crazy.” Presumably, the whale that consumes Jay wouldn’t have been in the position to do that if not for the folly of man.
It’s a climate change movie, then.
Sort of. In both that and other ways, it’s better than Digger.
So how does Jay make it out in the end?
He explodes a hole through the whale, using a battery he has on hand, the last of the oxygen from his tank, and some steel wool he finds in the whale’s stomach.
Ocean garbage saves his life?
It does. So maybe Whalefall isn’t better on climate than Digger after all.
What is a “whalefall,” anyway?
As Brolin explains near the end of the movie, it’s the term for what happens when a whale dies and a whole new oceanic ecosystem blooms in and around its corpse. And yes, whalefall is a real thing.
That’s actually a beautiful and evocative concept.
You know what? It is. Congratulations: You’ve been whale-pilled.
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