Whalefall Turns A Biblical Fable Into A B-Movie Survival Thriller
Taut, tense, and full of tentacles, Whalefall delivers exactly what you want out of a survival thriller.
There’s no conflict more classic than that between a man and a whale. Since Jonah spent three days in the belly of a whale, the giant sea creature has remained a staple of literature — Captain Ahab was driven mad by one; Pinocchio saves his family from one. So it’s kind of astonishing that it’s taken so long for Hollywood to make a survival thriller about a whale. Perhaps it’s because it feels too absurd a premise to turn into a feature film, or because whales generally have better PR than, say, sharks. But Whalefall, a taut, painfully tense, and surprisingly goopy new thriller from No One Will Save You director Brian Duffield, delivers a terrifically entertaining whale survival thriller that puts a fun B-movie twist on the Biblical fable.
The secret to Whalefall’s success — apart from an admirably effective script by Daniel Krauss, who wrote the 2023 novel the film adapts — is leading man Austin Abrams. As the sole human onscreen for most of its runtime, the movie lives or dies by Abrams’ performance, which he has to deliver while entirely covered in some kind of viscous substance, or with his face hidden behind goggles or a breathing apparatus. It’s a huge challenge for the most talented actor, but Abrams has nailed the particular blend of hammy over-the-top reactions and grounded empathy that this kind of film requires — and which similarly made Bruce Campbell the B-movie star of his generation. With the one-two punch of Whalefall and his breakout role in Resident Evil, Abrams has cornered the market on the beleaguered everyday man who finds himself in a Situation. And as young scuba diver Jay Gardiner in Whalefall, he gets put in the worst situation of them all.
Whalefall opens with Josh Brolin’s Mitt Gardiner, Jay’s father and an expert scuba diver, at the end of his rope, literally. Wheezing and coughing from an advanced form of cancer, he ties weights around himself and jumps off a boat into the ocean. Cut to a year later, and Jay is visiting home for the first time since his father committed suicide, mourning with his mother (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd) that they were never able to recover Mitt’s body. Turmoiled over having never said goodbye to father, Jay throws on his scuba diving gear to search for his dad’s remains. Ignoring warning signs against scuba diving on the beach, as well as a suspicious number of beach rangers in the area, Jay returns to the water for the first time since he angrily parted ways with his father shortly before his death. But as he perches on the edge of a deep, seemingly bottomless trench, Jay witnesses a giant squid fleeing from a massive sperm whale. Though he quickly tries to get out of the way, Jay is caught in the squid’s frantic attempts to escape, and dragged screaming into the mouth of the whale.
The rest of the film is best described as the digestion scene of Nope, dragged out across 90-or-so excruciating minutes — and this is meant in the most complimentary way. From the very first sequence of Jay getting dragged into the belly of a whale, to his scuffles with the very alive, very angry squid, as well as his inevitable encounter with the whale’s acidic stomach fluid, Whalefall dances on the knife’s edge of tension and misery. With the added ticking clock of Jay’s oxygen tank running out in less than an hour, Whalefall starts to feel almost oppressively bleak. This is, again, where Abrams’ performance really saves the film from falling into a deeply depressing abyss.
As Jay, he shows an impressive resilience at each new, often harrowing, turn of events, and even brings a pleasant levity to some of the bleaker moments; one particular episode with a jellyfish that floats into the whale’s belly really displays Abrams’ unique charms. That, and the clever intercutting of flashbacks to Jay’s increasingly fraught relationship with his dad. Duffield and Kraus employ these flashbacks at smart points in Jay’s fight for survival: just as things are looking their most dire, and the tension is at a breaking point, we cut to a moment when Jay learned how to scuba dive with his dad, or when he clashed with him over his future. (These smash cuts also usually transpire right when Jay passes out, which makes for easy breaks in the unending tension.)
If you have daddy issues, you will survive a whale swallowing you.
In these flashbacks, Brolin makes the most of his screen time, playing suitably to type as the gruff, salt-of-the-earth (salt-of-the-sea?) father whose all-consuming passion for scuba diving drives a wedge between him and his beloved son. While these flashbacks offer a necessary reprieve from the stifling misery of Jay’s situation, they are also somewhat by-the-numbers, elevated mostly by Abrams and Brolin’s performances. Sometimes it feels, to counteract the torment of Jay’s present situation, Duffield amps up the emotional beats of these flashbacks, making a few feel slightly corny. But when Whalefall hits its (surprisingly surreal) climax, it manages to merge in those slightly hokey emotional beats with its harrowing survival thrills in an astonishing way.
Whalefall is the most effective kind of B-movie survival thriller in that it does what it says on the tin: Austin Abrams gets swallowed by a whale, and spends the rest of the movie trying to get out. That it makes this absurd premise as engaging and distressing as it is for 106 minutes is impressive enough; that it makes you cry at the end is even more so.
