What’s It About

Follows a scuba diver who, while looking for his father’s remains, is swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale and has just one hour to get out before his oxygen runs out.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Let me keep it a hundred with y’all. I’ve watched people get eaten by sharks, dinosaurs, and aliens. But I had never watched a dude get swallowed whole by a sperm whale and then try to sort out his feelings about his father while sliding around in its throat. That’s “Whalefall,” the new survival thriller from director Brian Duffield (“No One Will Save You,” “Spontaneous”). Duffield and author Daniel Kraus turned Kraus’s 2023 novel into the script together, and the result is half survival story, half grief drama. One half works. The other half keeps coming up for air when it should stay under. Austin Abrams (“Euphoria,” the “Resident Evil” reboot) plays Jay Gardiner, a college kid living in Iowa, which is about as far from the ocean as you can get. Shout out to the Midwest. Jay heads home to the California coast for the one-year anniversary of his father’s death. His dad, Mitt (Josh Brolin), was a fisherman, tour guide, and scuba diver who knew the sea better than he knew his own son. Mitt tried hard to shape Jay into a copy of himself, and it did not go well. When Mitt learned that cancer would kill him slowly, he chose his own way out. He strapped on diving weights, walked into the Pacific, and never came back. That left his family with an empty casket and a pile of hurt nobody wanted to talk about. Jay doesn’t come home out of love. He comes home out of guilt, and that guilt gives him a reckless plan: dive down, find his father’s remains, and bring back proof so the family finally has something real to bury. So before sunrise, he sneaks out while his mom (Elisabeth Shue) and his two sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd) sleep. He gets his tank filled, dodges his father’s old friend (John Ortiz), and slips past the officials who have shut down Monastery Beach because whales were spotted nearby. Yeah. That should’ve been his sign. At first, the dive looks beautiful. Cinematographer Aaron Morton makes the glowing kelp forest feel calm and clear, and the muffled sounds pull you right under with Jay. Then everything flips. Jay swims straight into a fight between a sperm whale and a giant squid. The whale wins, the squid loses, and Jay gets sucked in with dinner. Now he’s stuck in the whale’s throat, sliding toward its stomach, with less than an hour of air left. The whole whale thing is worth the price of admission. The whale’s insides, designed by Ramsey Avery and the crew at Wētā Workshop, are alive and well; the insides are alive, moving, and dripping like an actual organism (in a good way). Duffield’s direction comes to the rescue; he avoids altering the picture, while the sound design ensures that every sound made by the whale indicates danger to whatever is in there. If it had not been for all the work done off screen, we would have only heard Jay suffering, instead of experiencing it. Abrams carries most of the movie by himself, and he puts in real work. He gasps, grunts, panics, and claws his way through that slimy prison, and he’s easy to root for. Still, after an hour of him moaning and begging his dead father for help, I was lowkey rooting for the end credits too. Things turn messy after the whale segment is over. You see, the director keeps cutting back to memories involving Mitt. Brolin acts brilliantly as a father who always thinks he’s right, has a scruffy face, and sounds like gravel when talking. You’ll buy all his memories, but at the same time, such flashbacks ruin the tension pretty badly. When it comes to the script, Jay is asked to go through a number of years of anger and forgiveness in no time. Once again, loads of stuff to be done. Then it gets down to absurd stuff. Being out of air, Jay starts hearing Mitt’s voice from beyond the grave. So eventually he sees his father and the whale as the one character. The director wants a spiritual moment. But this feels like a joke instead. Here’s what bothers me most, though. Elisabeth Shue, Jane Levy, and Emily Rudd are three talented actresses, and the movie gives them almost nothing to do. They sleep, they worry, they wait. They aren’t characters so much as background. John Ortiz, the only actor of color in the main cast, mostly exists as somebody Jay has to sneak around. When everyone outside the whale is only there to explain one guy’s pain, you don’t have a family drama. You have a one-man show with extras. A story about a family losing its father should let that family actually feel something on screen. Fun fact: a “whale fall” is what scientists call it when a dead whale sinks to the ocean floor and feeds sea life down there for decades. The movie clearly wants Mitt’s death to feed Jay’s healing the same way. That’s a beautiful idea on paper. On screen, it only half lands. At the end of the day, is “Whalefall” worth your cash? If you’re down for an ugly, thrilling, one-of-a-kind survival adventure with top-notch visuals, then it’s a yes. But if you’re looking for some sorrowful tale that can really tug at the heartstrings, you might leave feeling as hollow as the casket.

OUR RATING – A WHALE OF A TALE 5