Brian Duffield, director of 2023’s No One Will Save You, brings us Whalefall, adapting author Daniel Kraus’ novel from the same year, with the two co-writing the film’s screenplay.
It features Austin Abrams, who we last saw just weeks ago in the new Resident Evil, thrown into mortal peril once again as a diving mishap has him falling into the mouth of a gigantic sperm whale and into its belly beyond. What a month he’s having!
‘We’re gonna drink ‘til we soften up into something the whales can slurp down easily.’
Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, a young man returning home to California after having moved away to Iowa for college. Not only is he back in town, he’s also back by the coast. His late father (former Goonie and Mad Titan, Josh Brolin) practically lived on the water, fishing and touring, learning everything he could about the ocean, but while he tried his best to pass that knowledge on to Jay, his harsh attitude and tough love parenting eventually drove a wedge between him and his son.
That same brashness led him to throw himself in the water when his cancer became terminal, rather than spluttering for weeks in a hospital bed. Now, over a year later, Jay and his family lament the fact that they could never find his body, and Jay takes it upon himself to put his learned skills to the test and dive deep into the same off-shore trench to try and bring ‘just one bone’ home. From there, it’s a simple story of boy meets whale.
Where Geppetto seemed happy to settle in and get cosy, Jay’s experience with the whale is far more claustrophobic and nightmarish. Disney imagined Monstro’s innards as a cavernous space that you could lose yourself in, but Whalefall paints its own interior as a series of tight, convulsing chambers in which you could very well lose your life. I’ve never been swallowed by a whale before (luckily, from what I’ve read, it’s physically impossible, a fact that has caused some to discount this film immediately, rather unfairly) so I can’t comment on the accuracy of the decor, but the writhing, jittering walls of flesh are innately scary, especially with a cinema sound system accentuating each thud and pulse.
Abrams, too, does a very good job of selling the danger, and the man’s on a solid run of delivering solidly sympathetic survivalists that help to ground big blockbusters. The premise is terrifying – there’s really no two ways around that fact, we would all lose our mettle well before our oxygen tank ran out – and Abrams’ portrayal sees him screaming and panicking, with almost as much blubber as the walls of the whale itself. Even as the narrative carries on and the film’s longueurs threaten to drag it down to the briny depths, Abrams never loses sight of those monumental stakes.
Viewers, on the other hand, may be left wishing for a map – I know I was. Whales, apparently have three stomachs and Jay’s trials and tribulations see him moving through each one, climbing through squishy orifices like he’s in the world’s grossest escape room. That feeling of being trapped counts for a lot, but there’s little room for us to follow Jay’s thought process in trying to escape along outside of some awkward (and thankfully brief) interludes where he starts talking to himself. It’s here that the story’s novel origins rear their head – it’s a lot easier to trace a survival story along when you’re able to read the character’s inner monologue.
The film manages to keep us on the hook by cutting away to flashbacks with Jay’s father, Brolin’s character always teaching him something, but as good as Brolin is in these personal father-son moments (I can’t name a bad Brolin performance from what I’ve seen of him), the narrative would be better served if it linked these lessons into the present day action more concretely.
The film attempts this – Jay’s dad’s words obviously echoing in his head in a way that almost eschews the need for Jay himself to say anything aloud – but while some of these beats work, I would’ve loved to see a more methodical, calculated escape to really amp up the stakes and heighten that sense of Jay’s past experiences with his dad influencing his response to the clear and present danger.
While scenes like Jay calling for help from inside the whale’s mouth could wind up feeling laugh out loud funny rather than scary, the surreality of the whole experience does a lot to abate those worries. Though the film does eventually descend into some hallucinogenic and ‘out there’ leaps of logic that no doubt worked better in the source material, those crucial flashbacks to Jay’s bond with his dad did ring true to me, though they could’ve hit all the more with some tweaks and streamlining.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong threat, injury detail.
Whalefall is in cinemas now.
