Director: Brian Duffield
Starring: Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz
Certificate: 15
Run Time: 106 mins
Whalefall is an adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel about a teenage scuba diver who gets swallowed by a sperm whale when searching for his father’s remains. Rising star Austin Abrams stars as the teenager in question, Jay, while Josh Brolin appears in flashbacks as his estranged father, Mitt, who we see commit suicide in the film’s opening scene and his body is never found. Jay feels guilt over his strained relationship, having not spoken to his father for some time before his death and he is yet to open a letter left for him (Jay’s two sisters also received letters and have opened theirs). So Jay decides to go diving where his father ended things, despite warnings against swimming due to high currents and when he encounters a giant squid fighting a sperm whale, the squid’s tentacles entangle his diving equipment, forcing him to be swallowed into the whale.
Visually, Whalefall is an interesting work and its concept differs from other survival thrillers out there, even if it’s totally biologically unrealistic. Duffield portrays the ocean as a perilous alien world, and there’s real tension and grandeur in the main set piece of Jay being swallowed. Once Jay’s in the whale’s stomach, there’s a tension in the claustrophobic sequences where he has to endure squid bites and stomach acid burns, among other horrors.
It’s just a shame that the rest of the film is so generic and overly sentimental, making the 106-minute running time feel a real chore. The flashbacks to Jay’s memories of his father are groan-inducing and do nothing to further the plot. Despite being written by director Brian Duffield and Daniel Kraus, the dialogue feels forced in all of the scenes outside of the whale, and even Jay monologues to himself a little too much through his breathing apparatus – less would have been more here.
The performances here are also problematic – Austin Abrams, terrific in Weapons and Resident Evil (of which the latter shares some parallels with here) is simply miscast. I didn’t buy him playing a character that’s younger than he is and he fails to convincingly deliver the shonky dialogue he’s saddled with. Josh Brolin fares better in a more believable role, but even he can’t hide behind the poor script. The rest of the cast are all used for minor performances and none of them are particularly impressionable.
Outside of a handful of promising set pieces, Whalefall bellyflops with its cloying flashbacks, on-the-nose themes and its waste of Austin Abrams. This would have fared far better as a tightly wound 80-minute thriller if it had trimmed all the family fat away – but even then, it’s difficult to get on-board with its unrealistic premise. The main thing to take away from this film are a couple of inventive moments of horror inside the whale and how Duffield uses the space – but Whalefall is definitely no whale of a time at the cinema.
