“The ocean always provides,” says Josh Brolin’s grizzled, tattoo-clad Mitt Gardiner in survival drama Whalefall, a seadog so salty you could season your fish and chips with him. He’s talking to his son Jay (Austin Abrams), a young man who has spent his life trying to live up to his boozy, abusive father’s demands.
Adapted from the novel by Daniel Kraus, this Biblical-like tale of redemption begins as Mitt is on his boat in the middle of the ocean, alongside friend Hewey (John Oritz). Before you know it, he’s jumped into the water.
With no body found, Jay takes it upon himself to search for his father’s remains underwater, a journey that takes him, quite literally, into the belly of the beast. His father’s scuba training ringing in his ears, Jay wades into the waves at Monterey’s Monastery Beach, ignoring the sign that says “at least 30 people have died”.
This is not crystal clear Caribbean waters, but murky depths, filled with swathes of seaweed. Before long, Jay discovers the true power of Mother Nature, as he heads lower and lower. A huge sperm whale, pursuing a giant squid, swallows him whole.
It’s intriguing that we have just seen Abrams in Zach Cregger’s stunning zombie video game adaptation of Resident Evil. For whatever twisted horrors he faced in that pales next to Whalefall; as he comes to inside the stomach of this giant mammal (somehow managing to keep his breathing apparatus on throughout), he must find a way out before being digested.
View Green Video on the source websiteBe warned, this is no cosy Jonah and the Whale story. Director Brian Duffield creates a stomach-knotting atmosphere, with Abrams surrounded, often squeezed, by the whale’s fleshy innards.
The result is something akin to what that enigmatic bounty hunter Boba Fett endured inside the Sarlacc Pitt in Star Wars episode Return of the Jedi – the difference being, he had a weapon to cut his way out.
Credit to Duffield (whose work include the 2023 sci-fi/horror No One Will Save You), he and his special effects team fully immerse you into this claustrophobic nightmare. Suckered by squid tentacles or scalded by the whale’s stomach acid, poor Jay is mangled almost beyond recognition. The ocean, it seems, really does provide.
Flashbacks to his troubled relationship with his father are intercut, as Jay’s consciousness drifts to thoughts of the man he could never please. Some moments are tender (they bond over John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel Canary Row); most are not.
“You’re not ready,” chides Mitt, believing his son has yet to grow into a man. Dispensing ocean-going wisdom, and radiating a love for the forces of the sea, Mitt also heaps pressure on Jay, his only son (we briefly see his two older sisters and mother, played by Elizabeth Shue).
The problem is, the film swims between fable and realism and never stays afloat. Is it all a hallucination? Maybe. But Duffield’s fastidious quest for anatomical accuracy when it comes to what it might look like to be swallowed by a whale overhauls any emotional currency.
Mitt is nothing more than a phantasm in the film (to continue the Star Wars analogy, you half expect him to whisper “use the force, Jay” when the young man starts hearing his father’s voice in his head).
CG depictions of the giant sperm whale above the water also don’t quite convince, although shots of its silvery outline below the surface are quite beautiful, especially when the beast itself comes under attack from other ocean-going predators.
Unfortunately, the result is an uneasy mix, awash with both sentimentality and sheer, suffocating nastiness. At least Abrams proves his mettle; the actor does everything in his power to takes us along for this dive into the deep.
Whalefall is in UK cinemas from Friday 16 October 2026.
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