Whalefall
Director: Brian Duffield
Writers: Brian Duffield and Daniel Kraus
Cast: Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Shue
Full Disclosure: Daniel Kraus, who co-wrote the Whalefall screenplay and wrote the book on which the film is based, is a friend of mine. All that really means to me is that if I hadn't enjoyed the movie I probably wouldn't be writing about it, but in the interest of transparency I wanted to put that out there.
Whalefall's first great narrative success lies in its ability to disarm you. If you're going to see the film, you probably know the premise as laid out in co-writer Daniel Kraus's novel of the same name, and it's probably got you ready for something at least a little nuts. This is, after all, the movie about the guy who gets swallowed by a whale. No, really, that's literally what the movie's about.
But as the narrative gets underway, after the title and the marketing have primed you for the concept, you'll find that Whalefall is also something else: An ambitious attempt, through survival horror, to chart the course of thorny grief. Whale and all, it's a human, deeply emotional story, and it delivers those emotions while also delivering classic movie thrills.
Jay (Austin Abrams) had a rough relationship with his father Mitt (Josh Brolin), and that hasn't gotten better since Mitt's death a year ago. Though his mother (Elizabeth Shue) encourages him to properly grieve, Jay is still standoffish, putting off reading the letter his terminally ill Dad left for him, playing back all the memories of his time on Mitt's boat, and how uncompromising and stern his father could be. It's a portrait of a relationship that was perhaps never going to end well, but in Jay's case it ended especially badly.
But Jay's cold reaction to his father's legacy is only a mask. In reality, for himself and for his family, Jay wants to go out to the spot in the ocean where his father went under, just off California's Monastery Beach, and dive for his remains, to bring back something, anything, of Mitt's corpse. He takes a morning dive without telling anyone where he's going, ventures out into the deep canyon of ocean just off Monastery, and soon finds himself entangled in a battle between a giant squid and a sperm whale. One misstep and suddenly Jay is down the whale's throat, with less than an hour of oxygen, and a slim chance of survival.
It's perhaps the film's greatest triumph that Abrams signed on to play Jay, because as anyone who's already seen him in Resident Evil knows, his acting style was practically made for survival horror situations. Though the film frequently flashes back to Jay's past interactions with his father, charting the tension of their relationship, most of it is just Abrams, all alone in a whale's digestive tract, trying to find a way out through pain, desperation, and the inner-working of an animal so large it barely seems to notice that he's still wiggling around in there. He has to talk to himself, show us how Jay is thinking, and hit moments of deep emotional resonance as he remembers his Dad, all while floating in swallowed sea water and nursing his wounds. It's a remarkable performance, and his flashback scenes with Brolin only add more weight.
You can see a lot of the beats in this film coming, especially if you're well-versed in the world of survival horror as a means of resolving pre-existing trauma, but that does nothing to diminish its impact. Director and co-writer Brian Duffield, who's helmed some of the best genre movies of the last decade, continues to grow and expand his ambitions as a director, delivering beautiful underwater photography before trapping Jay inside the whale for a deluge of practical effects including gurgling masses of flesh, goopy stomach acid, and gnarly squid beaks. It's a film that feels grand and overwhelming in its sensory impacts, and yet it never loses the claustrophobia not just of Jay's body, but of his heart.
The last thing I'll say here, and the thing that'll stick with me most about Whalefall, is how…well, metaphysical it gets. Anyone who's read Kraus's novel knows what I'm talking about, and I won't spoil it here, but for all its survival horror trappings, and how effective they are, this is also a movie about finding a path to understanding, and how that path can sometimes transcend space, time, and oceans of pain. I wasn't sure if that particular emotional throughline could make its way to the screen intact, but Duffield and Kraus pulled it off, giving us a pulse-pounding film that'll bring your heart up into your throat, break it, then reassemble it again.
Whallefall is now playing in theaters.
