“Whalefall” asks how much patience you can sustain for discussing your friend’s daddy issues while also actively trying to help them escape being devoured by a literal whale. The answer, in director Brian Duffield’s at-once brutal and sincere survival thriller, is less than you might hope.
There’s plenty to unpack about the troubled relationship between young scuba diver Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) and his late father Mitt (Josh Brolin). But by chance, have you considered just how rapidly gallons of digestive fluid might rip away human skin?
Adapted by Duffield and Daniel Kraus from Kraus’ 2023 novel, this spectacularly unpleasant underwater adventure delivers on its premise with effects that are graphic, fascinating, and occasionally beautiful. It also keeps interrupting that accomplishment to explain why being swallowed by a sperm whale is emotionally significant. You would think the whale had that covered.
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Mitt’s seaside death opens the film and a year later, Jay heads into the ocean looking for his father’s remains — compelled by an obligation he can’t quite explain. A squid soon complicates the excursion, drawing him into the path of a feeding whale and then into the animal itself. That’s already one more creature than the metaphor strictly needs, but Duffield makes the encounter haunting. Before Jay becomes lunch, he sees the sperm whale in all its glory and he knows exactly how big the problem is.
Fresh off Zach Cregger’s “Resident Evil,” Abrams remains the kind of actor you perpetually want to root for, and his muffled screams through a scuba breathing apparatus are especially terrifying. Against his soft, sensitive frame, this underwater world looks impossibly hard. Toxic air and bubbling yellow acid turn the whale’s interior into a washing machine of physical injury and psychological torment, and Jay will regret diving without his gloves way, way more than he knows.
The effects are exceptional, but it’s the awareness Abrams brings to this predicament that really makes them hurt. Resting his head against some whale intestine while working the problem, he briefly evokes storybook illustrations suggesting a person could really make a home there. Then the flesh inexplicably ripples around him, reminding us whose home this actually is. For all its spiritual ambitions, “Whalefall” rarely lets you forget that its protagonist is inside an animal — and that’s mostly to the film’s benefit.
Thank God there’s some trash in the whale, too. It gives Jay materials to work with, while bioluminescent creatures provide light and a strangely ethereal atmosphere. And a jellyfish becomes something like Wilson from “Cast Away,” albeit with less obvious sporting potential. These luminous interludes also ease us into the memories of Jay’s father that keep intruding on his predicament. Sometimes, a flashback is a welcome reprieve. (God knows you don’t want anything else to happen to this kid.)
Mostly, however, the cutting is jarring. The past and present compete for attention without consistently making each other more interesting, and the escape-room mechanics suffer from a peculiar combination of overexplanation and confusion. Despite Duffield’s skill with minimal dialogue in “No One Will Save You,” Jay frequently announces what we can already see. He coughs, then explains that the air is poisonous. Even oxygen updates are delivered aloud to an audience of stomach contents.
Meanwhile, the geography that would help us understand his decisions remains frustratingly vague. Beyond distinguishing the gross green part from the super fucking scary yellow part, navigating the interior of the whale almost requires a Discovery Channel overlay. Some punishing sequences are difficult to appreciate as physical problems because it’s unclear where Jay is or what movement might accomplish. Too often, “Whalefall” explains the obvious and leaves the complicated stuff floating.
Much of the instruction arrives through remembered lessons from good ol’ Dad, whose wisdom becomes both a survival resource and a reason to reconsider him. But knowing something about the ocean doesn’t necessarily make a man a good father, and the script keeps reaching for those pearls of wisdom as if their practical usefulness might settle something about their history. That’s a lot to ask of scuba advice.
Brolin’s character mocked his son, called him “soft lungs,” and said frightening things when drunk. His death from mesothelioma leaves plenty for Jay to process. The problem isn’t that the kid hasn’t suffered enough to deserve a movie. Rather, it’s that the flashbacks don’t make this particular father and son compelling enough to keep pulling us out of the whale.
Covered in nautical tattoos and given to spiritual proclamations about the ocean’s generosity, Mitt is recognizable as a type. But Brolin and Abrams struggle to feel like members of the same family, and Jay has little identity outside their conflict. An out-of-state scholarship suggests a future, but scarcely defines the person who might live it. When Brolin’s voice takes on a ghostly presence inside the whale, the emotional insistence grows louder without becoming more persuasive.
There’s something intriguing in that slipperiness. His dad is the whale, but his dad is also his dad, and the whale is also… a whale. Like Jonah, Jay confronts the possibility that divine will, fate, or whatever governs the universe cannot be outrun. Then again, the creature’s indifference suggests there may be no deeper meaning available. That tension gives Duffield more to work with than the familiar monster-as-grief metaphor, even when he struggles to make it coherent.
For comparison, Mike Flanagan’s “Gerald’s Game” faced a related challenge, threading traumatic memories of an abusive marriage through an immediate survival problem. There, the psychological story energized a bedroom where the protagonist could barely move. Here, an entire ecosystem is already happening. Asking viewers to contemplate childhood pain while monitoring digestion requires two kinds of attention that Duffield only intermittently brings together.
When he does, the results are extraordinary. A pressure-related assault on Jay’s sinuses explodes into a memory of fireworks, a transition as beautiful as it is horrible. Likewise, a sequence involving orcas reveals a filmmaker capable of making this ocean feel moving and immense. These passages connect sensation and emotion without stopping to explain their relationship. Of course, they also make the surrounding imbalance more frustrating. So does the puzzle’s payoff.
Armed with a trash bag, an old sock, scuba equipment, and more emotional baggage than you could package in a semester-long underwater basket-weaving class, Jay seems equipped to impress us with his ingenuity. Instead, too much of the process resembles making peace with your past and developing marine communication powers akin to Aquaman. There is a practical component, but it struggles to compete with the therapeutic one.
After everything Jay endures, you want the satisfaction of watching him work the problem of a damn whale. Instead, you’re seeing him move through the digestive tract of a screenplay, where emotional breakthroughs carry an awkward amount of physiological authority.
More of the horror-comedy sensibility Duffield brought to “Spontaneous” might have helped this material breathe. Still, the sincerity matters, and so does the achievement of realizing something this strange with such conviction. Even when the metaphor is painfully on the nose, the film’s most disturbing images are more than their dramatic limitations and a whale is still an astonishing place to spend a movie.
“Whalefall” isn’t always sure what it wants to add to the mythology of these creatures: Are we afraid of what whales can do to us, or ashamed of what we have done to them? Its father-son drama doesn’t settle the matter. But Duffield does contribute something to the conversation, and it’s worth appreciating on its own terms… as a dude (and his very literary trauma!) stuck inside an actual whale.
Grade: B-
From 20th Century Studios, “Whalefall” is in theaters Friday, October 16.