Austin Abrams has a way of making you care about a character before you quite understand him. There is something familiar in his awkwardness and flaws, even when he is keeping much of himself hidden.
It helped him stand out in last year’s Weapons, and has become harder to overlook as he has moved into leading roles in Resident Evil and now Whalefall.
The latter gives him an extraordinary situation to make believable. Playing a young diver swallowed by a sperm whale, Abrams spends much of the film alone, trying to escape before his oxygen runs out.
It is the young man himself who holds our attention – his fear, his frustrations and the unfinished business with his father that brought him into the water. What sounds like a premise built for a couple of hours of high-concept fun becomes something unexpectedly moving.
Directed by Brian Duffield and adapted from Daniel Kraus’s novel, Whalefall follows Jay Gardiner, played by Abrams, who goes diving off California’s coast to recover his father’s remains.
He has an hour of oxygen left when he is swallowed, and the lessons his father taught him may be his best chance of getting out.
Josh Brolin plays his father Mitt, appearing in flashbacks that gradually explain the relationship. The two actors had already worked together in Weapons, but Whalefall puts their scenes at the centre of how we understand Jay. And to achieve them, both actors thrived on the tension between them, even if it took a toll.
“With him, it was fun because he got super into it, and it was super uncomfortable, even for me,” Brolin tells The National. “The discomfort that you see on the screen, I think that was a result of that discomfort on set.”
Abrams has kept a similar distance from co-stars before. During Wolfs, he resisted George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s attempts to befriend him, preserving the awe his character felt towards theirs. A September GQ profile described him wincing at the word “method”, though he was more comfortable explaining the thinking behind it.
“If everyone’s game for it, we might as well let these real dynamics hang,” he said.
It was Abrams who kept the tension going even when cameras stopped rolling on the Whalefall set. He explained that breaking it would have risked losing something he and Brolin had created and were both feeling. He acknowledged that this would not be the right approach to every film, but it suited this one.
Their scenes give Abrams a different challenge from the physical demands of the survival story. With Mitt, Jay has years of disappointment and resentment behind him, alongside a desire to connect that neither quite knows how to express. The film needs us to understand why the relationship continues to occupy him, even while he is trying to stay alive.
“Josh is always going to new places, and he’s always challenging himself. You don’t always find that,” Abrams says. “You hope you would find that in a partner – that they’ll go full throttle.
“If someone’s been doing it for a while, they find their tricks and the things that work for them. But Josh is willing to go there and keep exploring. I’m grateful that he’s still excavating and still going there.”
Brolin remembers being fascinated by experimental theatre, particularly the idea of actors rehearsing for six months to see what effect their work might have.
“I think young actors are looking back at certain actors and saying, ‘What was that? Instead of just entertainment, what is getting into a role? What is full conviction? What is experimenting?’,” he says.
“You try to do movies that slap you awake. You want to have a full experience.”
In the film, Jay can shut his father out but still want his approval. Abrams makes both impulses feel true, drawing us close to someone who struggles to let anyone in. How much of his real life goes into that is harder to separate.
“It’s everything,” Abrams says. “It’s the things that you don’t want to look at or are painful to look at. Then it’s going to hopefully go in to new territory and new lands you’ve never been to before. That’s definitely the hope.”
Whalefall is in cinemas now across the Middle East