‘Whalefall’ Review: What Happens When the Belly of the Beast Becomes a Confession Booth?

‘Whalefall‘ sounds like a pitch that gets laughed out of the room and then fought over in a bidding war. Brian Duffield directs this adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s novel, with Kraus co-writing the script, and 20th Century Studios is releasing it in theaters on October 16. The idea fits on a poster, a scuba diver gets swallowed by a sperm whale and has to find a way out.

Austin Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, a young man who dives into the ocean to look for the remains of his father Mitt, played by Josh Brolin. Mitt is terminally ill when the film opens, and he walks into the sea on his own terms. Jay’s mother, played by Elisabeth Shue, and his sisters, played by Jane Levy and Emily Rudd, cannot find peace without a body to bury, so Jay goes down to find one.

What follows is a film in two halves that share a single body. One half is a survival thriller, and the other is a story about a son who never got to settle things with his father. The thriller half is where I was thoroughly hooked, because Duffield treats the whale’s stomach as a living, hostile machine of muscle, acid and slime. A giant squid the whale was chasing makes everything worse.

The production built a full scale whale stomach for Abrams to crawl through, and it pays off in every frame. You can almost feel the weight of each wet surface he drags himself across. Few recent creature features have made a confined space feel so tactile, and anyone prone to claustrophobia may want to sit near the aisle.

Abrams is the reason it all holds together. He spends most of the film alone with very little dialogue, and he communicates panic, exhaustion and stubbornness through his breathing and his body. After ‘Resident Evil’ and ‘Weapons’, he has become the actor you cast when you need someone to suffer convincingly, and here he suffers beautifully.

The craft around him deserves just as much praise. Cinematographer Aaron Morton keeps pushing in on eyes and faces, and Pietro Scalia’s editing gives those close ups a frantic, intimate rhythm. The sound design does a huge amount of heavy lifting too, turning every gurgle and squelch into a threat.

My frustrations come whenever the film leaves the whale. The flashbacks to Jay and Mitt are well acted, with Brolin softening nicely as Jay’s view of his father shifts, but they often state their emotions so plainly that they slow the momentum the stomach scenes build. I wanted the film to trust the metaphor more and explain it less, because the image of a man trapped inside something he cannot digest says everything already.

Even so, I left the theater impressed and a little queasy, which feels like the right combination. ‘Whalefall’ is gross, tense, sincere and far more moving than its premise has any right to be, even when it overstates its feelings. I give it 8 out of 10.

Did the father and son story land for you as well as the survival thriller did, or would you have stayed inside the whale the whole time, let me know in the comments?