I do love a trashy fun disaster movie on the ocean. But we’ve covered most of the sharks at this point. I did wonder what was left out there. Turns out it was Whalefall, a bigger, sillier spectacle of the garbage ocean movie. Poor Austin Abrams, from zombies to now sperm whales, dude can’t catch a break.
Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) is still struggling to deal with his dad Mitt’s (Josh Brolin) death. Despite please from Jay’s mom (Elisabeth Shue) and his sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd), Jay refuses to read the letter dad left him from all the pain Mittl caused Jay, to the point he moved to Iowa for college. Back for the one year anniversary, the sadness of his family pushes Jay to go out and try to retrieve something of Mitt to put in his empty casket. But that means going DEEP into the ocean, where, say, a sperm whale might be chasing a squid, sucking in everything in its path?
After the incredible chase with the whale and squid about 15 minutes in, it becomes clear this is a movie about a guy breathing through scuba gear stuck in a whale’s digestive system. You know who likes gimmicky movie chances? Brian Duffield, the guy who made a silent alien invasion movie in 2023 and made it hella exciting. Duffield knows no one knows what a whale digestive system looks like, so he basically has carte blanche to design it. What he makes is terrifying: a shapeshifting very alive but existenZ like pulsating orifices that contract/expand unexpectedly. Austin Abrams gamely goes through the ringer, put in crazy situations and reacting the best he can underneath all that scuba gear. These stomach chambers are claustrophobic as hell, even moreso if you’re trying to evade a giant squid at the same time. Duffield extracts about as many setpieces as he can inside these chambers, each of which is a new wrinkle that we can mostly follow along with despite Abrams’s muffled dialogue.
That’s about 45 minutes to an hour of Whalefall’s runtime. The movie needs some sort of padding to get it over the finish line. It settles for the standard broken father/son trope. Brolin and Abrams do the best they can to make those sequences feel meaningful (Brolin’s specific choices do a lot of the work) for the story. If we don’t care at all, that means the more daring storytelling elements (that probably work wonders on the page of the novel this is adapted from) are going to fall flat. And they do, about 63% of the time. Fortunately Duffield uses these sequences as transition material, and builds us back up to what we want to see. But searing character examination of the human condition vs. Austin Abrams using a jellyfish as a flashlight to climb up a whale’s throat? I’m here for the latter.
Oh, I didn’t think I’d want subtitles for Whalefall for distraction purposes. But they are helpful for the record with the underwater sound fuzziness. It did make me during the boring moments imagine Bane down there, trying to punch his way out of the stomach, talking about how he adopted the dark to the giant squid.