Warning: This post contains spoilers for Whalefall, now in theaters.
It's been a big few months for Austin Abrams moaning and groaning his way through some of the worst situations imaginable. First, as medical courier Bryan Hodukavich in Resident Evil, he was forced to contend with an onslaught of mutant zombie monsters. Now, as Jay Gardiner in Whalefall, he spends the majority of the film's 106-minute runtime getting repeatedly maimed inside the belly of an 80-foot-long sperm whale that weighs 60 tons.
Directed by Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You, Spontaneous) and co-written with Daniel Kraus (the author of the best-selling 2023 novel on which the movie is based), Whalefall follows Jay as he plunges into the treacherous depths off Northern California's Monastery Beach to retrieve the unrecovered remains of his late father Mitt (Josh Brolin), a legendary local diver who became severely ill from advanced, terminal Mesothelioma. The movie's opening scene shows Mitt leaving sealed letters for his wife and three children in a cooler on his boat before taking his own life by strapping diving weights to himself and jumping into the ocean. A year later, Jay still hasn't opened his letter when he is swallowed by a massive whale who's on the hunt for a giant squid in those same waters.
With just about an hour of oxygen left in his diving tank, Jay must endure a series of increasingly agonizing ordeals as he searches for a way to escape his terrifying predicament. There's a nasty encounter with the giant squid's razor-sharp beak, exposure to corrosive stomach acid, and the ever-present threat of being crushed by the whale's constricting organs or suffocating on the toxic, unbreathable methane gas inside its body. Amid the visceral horror of Jay's ingestion, we learn more about his complicated relationship with Mitt, a harsh and often emotionally abusive man, through a series of flashbacks.
Eventually, the whale breaches the surface and Jay nearly manages to break free by climbing out of its open mouth. But he ends up tumbling back inside the whale as it dives deep down into the ocean, causing Jay's eardrums to explode and him to start to hallucinate from lack of oxygen and panic. It's then that Jay, believing he is likely going to die, begins hearing his late father's voice speaking to him through the whale. As the whale is attacked by orcas, saved by its own pod, and returns to the surface, Jay is forced to process his trauma, confront the guilt and grief he feels over not visiting his dad before he died, and come to the realization that the only way he's going to survive is by applying the tough-love diving lessons Mitt drilled into him as a child to his current situation.
"The whole story is based on his relationship with his father, and not being able to take in what his father is trying to impart because of his father's personality and the way that he does it," Brolin told the Direct of Whalefall's overarching message. "And I think what the whale represents a symbol of how to get out of our own way in order to inhale those gems that you need, because I think the father really wants him to become self-sustaining, and he does it in a way that's almost paranoid. So the son can't hear it, and then when the son needs it, you see that he heard it. He just didn't hear it in the way that [his father] wanted him to, and I don't blame him, by the way."
In the end, Jay is able to escape the whale, who has already succumbed to its orca injuries, by managing to blow it up from the inside. The whole thing is overly sappy and obviously a bit preposterous, but if you're able overlook the absurdity of the premise and some particularly cheesy lines of dialogue, then you may be left feeling some type of way about the meaning of unconditional love. As the whale version of Mitt somberly reminds Jay, "The whale is forever."