There’s something invigorating about a film treating a boldly ridiculous premise with utterly intense sincerity. It’s really the only way to approach a film like Whalefall, which finds its young adult protagonist, Jay (Austin Abrams), trapped in the belly of a whale, with less than an hour to find his way to freedom before everything goes dark.
A deep-sea dive intended to bring catharsis to Jay’s family after the sudden loss of his father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), turns into chaos when a simple recovery mission is interrupted by a battle of oceanic behemoths. In his attempt to escape the vicious battle between a Giant Squid and a Sperm Whale, Jay gets caught up and winds up trapped in the whale’s gullet alongside what is left of the very angry squid. He’s been swallowed, and it’s only a matter of time before the whale’s digestive system finishes the job. He’s got to get out.
Director Brian Duffield is no stranger to high-concept genre films. His first feature as a director was the cult favorite 2020’s Spontaneous, which centered around an epidemic of spontaneous teenage combustion in a small town, which he then followed up with the housebound alien thriller, No One Can Save You in 2023. Both films were hits with critics and audiences that didn’t quite manage to set the world on fire financially. However, with Whalefall, Duffield is supported by an incredible cast of veterans and the full marketing force of a major studio, so it may be time for the tides to shift in his favor.
It would be easy for Duffield and his co-writer Daniel Kraus – adapting the screenplay from his own novel of the same name – to focus entirely on the peril experienced by Jay, but Whalefall has bigger fish to fry.
As much as Whalefall is about Jay and the whale, it’s also about Jay and Mitt. This is a story about estranged father and son and the myriad ways in which reconciliation can help a damaged soul to heal. The film takes itself incredibly seriously, even at the most insane moments, allowing Jay’s unresolved trauma to steer his actions in ways that are both coldly logical, and morbidly hilarious as he fights to free himself with whatever detritus the whale’s belly has to offer him.
Though Jay spends most of his time inside this whale looking for a way out, Duffield is smart enough to give the audience other things to focus on. The film repeatedly cuts back and forth between Jay’s present crisis and his past antagonistic relationship with Dad. These respites from Jay’s misery and often repetitive attempts and failures to find his salvation are crucial to not only avoid fatigue in the viewer, but also to build context for the off-the-wall narrative turns employed in Whalefall’s third act.
Duffield and Kraus’s script does an excellent job of dropping breadcrumbs of crucial information throughout Whalefall’s run time. Every seemingly innocuous conversation delivers some nugget that Jay is able to use to extend his battle for freedom, and it is unsubtle in the most glorious way for fans of big swing cinema.
Imagine the narrative devices employed by Danny Boyle in Slumdog Millionaire where each answer given by Dev Patel in the game show springs from a different harrowing childhood story, except in Whalefall, the million dollars is surviving being eaten by a whale, and the childhood trauma is a Dad who was mean to Jay. There is a sense of baldfaced earnestness that is difficult to deny and will appeal to fans who love a bit of cheese with their melodrama.
For all the fun I had with the film, Whalefall is a bit indulgent and repetitive when it comes to its action sequences, but then again, how many different ways can you show a guy punching the inside of a whale looking for an orifice to escape through? Thankfully, just when it feels like the film feels like its running out of steam, the whole thing gets amazingly metaphysical in a way that’s difficult to predict, and these surprises are enough to jolt the viewer back to attention, whether or not we buy it is really a matter of how willing you are to suspend disbelief. However, by this point if you are okay with a movie about a man being swallowed by a whale, you can’t really complain about authenticity in the story telling.
Whalefall is bold and acquits itself nobly in the canon of blank-fall films like Skyfall and Moonfall, landing somewhere between the two on the plausibility spectrum. It’s damn near impossible to predict where this franchise will go next! I had a great time with this extremely tense, extremely sincere, and extremely silly film. Every minute of Whalefall is more unpredictable than the last, and isn’t that what makes genre cinema great?