GULP

This Insane New Movie Takes Place Inside a Whale—For Real

“Whalefall” is easily the year’s most bonkers thriller.

From Lifeboat to Buried, movies have often derived skin-crawling suspense from claustrophobia, and few have ever been as crazily suffocating as Whalefall, in which scuba diver Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) winds up literally trapped in—and forced to fight his way out of—the belly of an aquatic beast.

A biblical calamity that plays out in giddily squishy and stifling fashion, Brian Duffield’s film (October 16) is all about inducing intense squirms, and on that basis, it proves amusing genre pulp. Unfortunately, not content to deliver thrills alone, it also piles on sad-dad melodrama, causing its later passages to turn soggy in all the wrong ways.

While the Old Testament’s Jonah spent three long days praying and repenting in a whale’s stomach, Jay’s experience in Whalefall’s central location is considerably shorter and more traumatic. Before it gets down to business, however, the film (October 16, in theaters)—an adaptation of Daniel Kraus’ best-selling novel—picks up with the character as he returns to his childhood home after his dad Mitt’s (James Brolin) passing.

Jay and Mitt were on the outs when the latter killed himself by strapping on a weight belt and taking a plunge into their coastal town’s underwater canyon, and so upset is Jay about this suicide (and the things left unsaid) that he refuses to read the letter Mitt left for him.

Instead, as his mom Zara (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd) sleep, Jay sneaks out to the coast, where he intends to find his dad’s never-recovered body by venturing into the deep blue sea. As he enters the water, director Duffield’s camera dives in with him, bobbing madly as the waves toss Jay to and fro.

The ocean is angry, and after Jay fights his way through the surf and navigates a garden of seaweed and coral, he reaches the precipice of the gorge, where Whalefall provides a stunning panorama of the small protagonist dwarfed by his frighteningly enormous marine environment.

Duffield and Kraus’ script packs the early going with key narrative details about Mitt’s fabled scuba career and jerkily demanding parenting, as well as Jay’s frustration at never being good enough for his pops and his resentment of the tough love he suffered. Such material is transparent table-setting for Jay’s climactic reckoning with his paternal hang-ups.

Yet first, Whalefall gets to the horror-y good stuff. Peering over the ravine’s ledge, Jay witnesses a giant squid trying to evade an even larger sperm whale. Unluckily stuck in the middle of these creatures’ path, Jay takes a thrashing. Then, once the squid is in the whale’s mouth, one of its tentacles grabs hold of Jay’s leg—a scary twist of fate that becomes outright nightmarish when, despite his best efforts, he’s pulled inside the goliath.

This is a legitimately insane scenario which Whalefall stages for maximum terror, and its nuttiness doesn’t subside upon locating Jay in a cramped abdominal cavity. Unsurprisingly, the diver is freaked out, and his panic and fear are worsened by his discovery that the squid is with him, alive, and exceedingly hungry. What follows is peak tight-quarters lunacy, and Jay doesn’t come out of this calamity unscathed. Nonetheless, he does learn valuable things about his new biological prison, such as the fact that its contractions can be deadly and that the atmosphere is toxic, thereby requiring him to keep sucking on his dwindling hour-long supply of oxygen.

Whalefall takes its story as seriously as possible, with Jay searching for avenues of escape—by exploring additional organic chambers—and employing whatever materials are at hand, including a claw-like whatsit and a bioluminescent jellyfish. Duffield treats the film as an, ahem, whale of a survivalist tale, and it benefits from both the sheer madness of its premise and the performance of Abrams, whose Jay is cool-headed enough to devise clever strategies for getting out of this mess and yet a relatable everyman who responds to his circumstances with furious muttering and cursing.

Whenever Jay suffers a painful blow or setback, Whalefall segues to flashbacks regarding Mitt, a gruff, no-nonsense ballbreaker with a scruffy beard and a torso covered in seafaring tattoos. These memories remind Jay of the tips of the scuba trade he needs to free himself, and they also clarify the origins of Jay and Mitt’s tensions, most of which stem from Mitt being an overbearing and cruel paterfamilias and Jay fleeing his presence (including by attending college in Iowa).

Brolin is asked to play such a grade-A jerk that he invariably chews the scenery, pronouncing, “Steinbeck is God” and “There’s more to life than fun!” Though his turn is hammy, it’s over-the-top in a manner that fits the wacko proceedings.

Whalefall’s narrative structure is serviceable, but at the midway point, Duffield and Kraus begin piling on the father-son mush to an egregious degree. Conversations with ghosts, anthropomorphic hallucinations, and tearful reunions—during which Jay gets to hear and say what he couldn’t before Mitt died—are excessively mawkish. More vexing, they take precedence over the survivalist mayhem, drenching everything in schmaltz that’s far gooier than the corrosive slime Jay trudges through in one particularly nasty intestinal compartment.

It’s not clear why Whalefall is so desperate for audiences to feel something other than anxiety and alarm, but its focus on Jay coming to terms with Mitt’s death—and, also, admitting his own mistakes and being absolved of his sins—is an anchor that weighs down the film.

Abrams does his best to emote while being entombed in this ancient mammal’s tummy, and he certainly conveys an apt level of mania, despondency, and resilience as Jay strives to achieve the virtually impossible. Too frequently in the home stretch, however, he’s asked to be more maudlin than this goofy endeavor warrants.

When it prioritizes its primary bonkers action, Whalefall is a B-movie expertly designed to elicit screams and laughs in a crowded multiplex theater. Just be forewarned that its initial peaks are ultimately washed away by a tidal wave of sentimental slop.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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