“Whalefall” is an undersea thriller that would like to do for whales what “Jaws” did for sharks. But it doesn’t work out that way. The movie comes closer to doing for whales what “Howard the Duck” did for barnyard superheroes — it makes you never want to see one of them again. Whales, of course, are beautiful creatures, and the one in “Whalefall” is a sperm whale with the boxy shape of a submarine, long and angular, a sleekly gliding beast that rules the ocean. Yet for most of the movie, we’re inside that whale. Literally inside it. The central character, Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams), has gone scuba diving off the coast of Monastery Beach near Monterey, Ca., in search of the body of his father, a gruff seaman who committed suicide. (He had mesothelioma, a form of cancer that meant he couldn’t dive anymore; for him, that meant life was no longer worth living.)
After submerging himself, Jay gets entangled in the tentacles of a giant squid, and that’s when the whale, who feeds on squid, pulls both Jay and the squid into his oversize gaping mouth. Moments later, Jay is trapped inside, surrounded by gooey protrusions of undulating flesh. For the rest of the movie, he’ll attempt to survive inside that whale, which means keeping himself from getting sucked out of the creature’s digestive antechamber (which glows phosphorescent blue) and into its inner stomach cavity (which glows a hellish red), where the stomach acid will start to dissolve him.
For a moment, it occurred to me that Jay might run into his father, à la Jonah or Geppetto. But no, he’s on his own, doing all he can to escape this tight squeeze of whale flesh. Is it gross? At times. Claustrophobic? A bit. Scary? Not even a little. The place Jay finds himself looks like a colonoscopy designed by H.R. Giger. The visual effects are…okay. At times, it’s as if we were locked in some pop-up theme-park ride called Full Cavity Search. At one point, Jay uses a jellyfish the whale has eaten to light his way, and that’s as close as he comes to finding a companion. “Whalefall” is a fearless tale of human perseverance and mammalian stomach lining. It should have been called “Project Hail Fish Guts.”
Watching “Whalefall,” I kept thinking, “Why would anyone want to see this movie?” But the answer is obvious. “Whalefall” was adapted from Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel, which in addition to being a bestseller was greeted with a great deal of acclaim. But something got lost in the translation. The thuddingly literal-minded movie that director Brian Duffield has made of it is a piece of thriller kitsch, full of unintentional laughs. With a hero who spends the heart of the film sucking on his oxygen mouthpiece, not so much talking as making frantic grunts of fear, “Whalefall” shuts us off from the most basic rooting interest. Sure, we want to see Jay get the hell out of there, but only because the whole ordeal is so stultifying and unpleasant.
It’s saying something that this is the second movie in a month where Austin Abrams has to fight his way out of the grip of fleshy tentacles, and only one of those movies isn’t terminally preposterous, and that’s “Resident Evil.” Abrams had an indie-hipster-on-the-run appeal in Zach Cregger’s horror hit, but in “Whalefall” he’s too wimpy by half, a simpering college kid who never proves to the audience that he has the right stuff. The film, like the book, takes off from the troubled relationship between Jay and his father, Mitt, played by Josh Brolin with a mean glare and body tattoos, in one of those brusquely overstated performances as an abusive macho dad — a Not So Great Santini who thinks the best way to prepare his son for what a tough world it is out there is to make the kid hate and respect him, in that order. As Brolin plays him, Mitt is like Robert Shaw’s Quint in “Jaws,” only ratcheted up several notches of boozy psycho masochism.
The film keeps jumping to flashbacks of Jay and Mitt at different points in their relationship, which is basically one long downhill slide. By the second half, though, Jay starts to realize that Mitt has actually taught him everything he needs to know to free himself from his predicament. The message? The young man who bonds with the ghost of his a–hole father while trapped in a gooey cushion of whale intestines stays with the ghost of his a–hole father. “Whalefall” even has an “ecological” side: The title refers to what happens when a whale’s carcass sinks to the ocean floor, an event that can give rise to a rich marine ecosystem. But “Whalefall,” the movie, is a carcass of a thriller that never rises.