‘Whalefall’ Review: Austin Abrams Struggles to Escape the Digestive Tract of a Whopper Mammal in a Dumb Thriller That Takes Itself Way Too Seriously

According to press notes for the deeply silly and painfully sappy Whalefall, while it has never happened, a sperm whale could swallow a person. Sure, Jan.

Forget Jonah, forget Geppetto and Pinocchio, this is a nature survival thriller set firmly in the real world — even if it plays more like imitation sci-fi — about a college kid who works out his daddy issues while trapped inside the multi-chambered stomach of a big-ass cetacean with roughly an hour’s worth of oxygen. After mutating into a tentacled monster in Resident Evil, and here doing battle with a vicious giant squid, Austin Abrams deserves cephalopod compensation pay.

Director Brian Duffield, who co-wrote the script with Daniel Kraus based on the latter’s novel, showed a flair for claustrophobic terror in a single setting with the gripping extraterrestrial home invasion thriller No One Will Save You. The tight hiding places of Kaitlyn Dever’s rambling house seem almost roomy compared with being stuck in the slimy gut of a sperm whale. But Whalefall is no match for the earlier film’s suspense and intensity. Could be because for much of the running time, Abrams’ Jay Gardiner is up against what looks like a very large irritable sphincter.

In keeping with that anal imagery, the movie often calls to mind a colonoscopy, from the probing POV of the endoscopic camera. Except that there’s a Chalamesque rising star and a bunch of bioluminescent jellyfish up there! I know, eww, right? How Jay ends up in the belly of the beast is the fault of that bastard squid, chased down and chomped on by the whale, but not ingested before it can ensnare hapless Jay with a lashing tentacle, saying, “Bitch, if I’m getting eaten by this thing you’re coming too!” OK, this is not SpongeBob SquarePants, so the squid doesn’t speak, but you know that’s what it’s thinking.

If all this sounds batshit crazy, it is, just not batshit crazy enough to be much fun. That’s in large part because it’s weighed down by Dad Drama to the point where it’s soggy even on dry land. We see Mitt Gardiner (Josh Brolin) cancer-coughing his guts up on the deck of a boat before strapping on dive weights and plopping overboard never to be seen again. Except, alas, in a bunch of overwrought flashbacks and hushed voiceovers.

Jay returns home to Monterey on the central California coast for the one-year anniversary of his dad’s death. But he finds it difficult to share the fond memories of his mother Zara (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd), not that we ever learn enough about them to make the women matter.

Heavily inked with seafarer tats, Mitt was a local diving legend and a gruff man’s man who never met an ocean metaphor he didn’t love. But sensitive Jay was never the rough-and-ready son Mitt wanted, so he spent his life tirelessly schooling the boy in the dangers and marvels of the sea, of whales and nature, his efforts to toughen up his son crossing over into emotional abuse. No one else at home appears to have noticed this, but it got bad enough to send Jay running off to college in Iowa.

Mitt’s body was never recovered, and when one of his daughters mentions how sad it is to think of the empty casket they buried, Jay feels a sudden stab of filial duty. Why, you might ask, given Mitt’s overbearing behavior with him. Jay still has bad dreams of his father’s bellowing 4:30 a.m. wakeup calls, giving him five minutes to be outside and ready to head to the boat. But psychological sense be damned, Jay sets himself the task of suiting up in diving gear and swimming out in search of his dad’s remains.

Mitt’s old fishing buddy Hewey (John Ortiz) tells Jay that his father plunged into the ocean at the edge of a steep underwater canyon off Monastery Beach, so that’s where Jay is headed. He gets pummeled by waves and rip currents while negotiating the famously difficult shore dive but is soon swimming among brightly colored marine life and undulating kelp forests that filter sunlight from the surface. However, things turn suddenly dark when he lands in the path of the panicked giant squid being pursued by the hangry sperm whale. That’s when the movie becomes 127 Hours underwater.

We know whales are noble-souled creatures, so spermy clearly didn’t mean to eat Jay, but it’s a spit-or-swallow situation and the whale opts for the latter. The initial shock of this freak accident is well-handled, notably when Jay tries to scramble up the whale’s jawline by climbing its teeth. And a tussle with the sharp-beaked squid — which is doing everything in its power not to be sucked into intestinal oblivion but still has time to do Jay some serious damage — is a scene of relative excitement.

But despite slick effects work, we never get sufficient understanding of the architecture of the whale’s insides. Jay just gets bumped from one squishy chamber of viscous lumps to another, fighting like hell to avoid following his squid adversary through a puckering hole and deeper into the digestive system, where the air turns into methane.

Mostly, it’s just hard to discern what the hell is going on in the action sequences, even with the bioluminescent jellyfish lighting up the whale like a Christmas tree. It’s distracting also that the whale’s internal structure so often recalls the landscape of Alien, right down to the sticky goop. The visuals are too murky even to provide a nasty thrill when a pod of orcas descends on Jay’s gargantuan host. Much of the work to keep the movie’s pulse racing is done by the dense soundscape folded into Joseph Trapanese’s churning score.

Abrams does yeoman’s work with a character stuck in a tight spot for most of the running time, constantly grunting and gasping with a mixture of anguish and exhaustion as his body gets progressively more beat up and broken. Whalefall is basically Nat Geo torture porn.

But that’s preferable to the movie’s swerve into saccharine grief therapy, as Jay starts communing with Mitt once the dead dad and the whale become a single soul. No matter how many times Mitt intones Meaningful Dialogue like “The ocean always provides” or “The whale is forever,” it doesn’t negate what a jerk he was to Jay when he was alive. But as eye-rollingly dumb as it is, this is a drama in the business of healing, of nature in all its savage nobility soothing wounds and mending bonds. Or something.

The title comes from the term used to describe a dead whale carcass sinking to the ocean floor, where its flesh becomes a smorgasbord for entire ecosystems, nourishing countless other marine life forms. It’s an evocative image that clearly ties into the fate Mitt chose rather than die on a hospital bed, but the spiritual dimension Whalefall strains so hard for ends up sinking like a stone.