Is It Worth Braving the Terrors of Nature to See Austin Abrams in ‘Whalefall’ on the Big Screen?

By Jesse Hassenger

Whalefall is the kind of movie that, over the past six or seven years, has played best and most often on streaming services. Limited-location and/or survival thrillers like Oxygen, Apex, The Guilty, Don’t Move, and any number of shark movies have become staples of at-home watches, not prestigious enough to consistently warrant a theatrical release, while also handily more cinematic than the glorified TV movies that sometimes get pass the streaming QA. Filmmaker Brian Duffield’s last directorial effort, No One Will Save You, was one of those, about a solitary young woman in a small town who must fend for her life during an alien invasion. That movie was well-received enough for his next feature, the horror-adjacent survival thriller Whalefall, to earn a big-screen release this weekend. But should you jump to the movie theaters along with it?

At first, Whalefall seems more claustrophobic than even certain confinement thrillers. It doesn’t strictly limit itself to one location, introducing Jay (Austin Abrams), a young man with complicated feelings on the first anniversary of his father’s death. His dad (Josh Brolin), whose nautical suicide in the face of terminal illness is shown in the film’s first scene, was an unforgiving taskmaster who also happened to love and revere nature; a deep-sea diver and boatman, he often berated Jay during seemingly endless diving and survival training, as illustrated in a series of flashbacks. Visiting home for the first time since his father’s passing, Jay secretly plans to scuba-dive into the ocean in hopes of recovering his dad’s remains, bringing his sisters and mother some peace, and, he probably wouldn’t admit, proving something to his old man. Instead, he gets eaten by a whale.

Well, not exactly eaten. (Cue Klaus from The Life Aquatic: “He was bitten? He was swallowed whole?”) Though he seems to know what he’s doing with his scuba gear, Jay gets snagged by giant squid as the creature struggles for its life in the jaws of a  sperm whale. (Cue Jesse Eisenberg from one of the Noah Baumbach divorce movies.) He’s sucked into the whale’s gaping maw, gear and all. To small to be chewed but too large to easily pass through the whale’s system, he’s stuck somewhere in the creature’s… throat? Gullet? Stomach? Basically, this is a movie about an epic case of indigestion, from the point of view of undigested.

This also means that much of the action takes place in the equivalent of a couple of rooms — squishy, watery, poisonous, sometimes acidic rooms. [Ed. note: Getting flashbacks to Jabu-Jabu’s Belly in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time!] Duffield fuses computer effects (to depict the whale from the outside) and what look like largely practical effects (to fill out the cramped interior) in a way that could make for a B-movie fudge: A few shots of the majestic sperm whale, lots of shots of Austin Abrams squished into a small space.

Yet despite the movie’s claustrophobia, the scenes inside the whale are a triumph of visual-effects and art-direction ingenuity. (This isn’t the type of movie that typically gets nominated in the latter category at the Oscars, but maybe it should be.) The limited light and color scheme allowed in the bowels (or at least near the bowels) of a gigantic mammal can make some of these moments hard to follow, but Whalefall never crosses the line into incomprehensible, even without anyone providing Titanic-style analysis of what would happen if a person tumbled down into a whale’s mouth. The obstacles that Jay encounters are many, varied, and often gruesome, presumably rated PG-13 primarily by the grace of nature-doc-style biology and a relative lack of bloodflow. (Seeing skin start to melt off someone’s hands is, trust me, more disturbing than plenty of gore.)

Abrams, fresh off the night from hell in Resident Evil, might be (through no fault of his own) going back to the beleaguered-punching-bag routine a little soon, but he’s unusually skilled at taking the audience through what amount to a series of highly unfortunate events and a series of understandably muffled screams without becoming a one-note performer. If anything, Whalefall cries out to take advantage of Abrams’ Bruce-Campbell-of-the-2020s status and wring a little more black humor from his horrific situation.

Whalefall certainly has its moments of knowing gross-out levity, but as the movie continues, a different form of sinking feeling sets in: This is a movie that wants you to know how much heart it has. It’s an affliction that often befalls genre filmmakers who don’t want to be known as pure technicians, goosing the audience for the right jumps and flinches; they want to goose the audience’s emotions, too. So Jay isn’t just interacting with the memory of his father, which does prove useful in some of the survival advice he imparted; he’s wrestling with the very nature of parent-child relationships, the chaos of nature, and the way our unresolved relationships can feel as if they’re calling to us, guiding us, from the great beyond.

Terrence Malick could probably pull this off gracefully. Brian Duffield seems less qualified. Whalefall starts off as Boy The Shallows, with Brolin’s father character a perfectly acceptable motivating factor for the Abrams character (even if The Shallows did this just as well without actually needing to jump into the flashbacks). By the end, it’s aiming higher, for something more like Gravity, and all of the tearful father-son musings serve to highlight just how one-note these characters and relationships are.

That shouldn’t matter in a survival thriller, where the immediacy of the danger (and the implied what-would-you-do question to the audience) takes narrative priority. The repeated straining for poetry, through, stretches Whalefall to its limits in the bad way, turning an engagingly crazy story into a round of therapy. Some of this probably comes from the source material; novelist Daniel Kraus co-wrote the screenplay with Duffield, and maybe some interiority was lost in translation. In the movie, the scenes between Abrams and Brolin have the effect of faux-characterization; there’s no richness to the relationship. They barely seem to exist between Important Pivotal Memories.

Still, the whale (and squid, and jellyfish, and ocean) material does make Whalefall worth a trip to the multiplex, especially if it’s playing on a larger-format screen where you can take in its cramped details at a blown-up size. (Unfortunately, the movie sharing a release date with Street Fighter means the latter movie is taking up most IMAX screens, and often sharing Dolby showtimes; in Manhattan, which has multiple IMAX and Dolby screens, Whalefall just has a couple of Dolby showtimes across multiple auditoriums.) At home, the sheer volume of father-son scenes might put them on closer to equal footing with the pure survival material. On a bigger screen, nature has room to drown out nurture.

Whalefall opens in theaters October 16th.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.