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As a child who grew up attending Sunday school every week, I suppose I’ve thought about being swallowed by a whale more than the average person. In the classic Old Testament story, the prophet Jonah is swallowed by a whale (it might have just been a big fish) because he defies God’s direct instructions to go to the city of Niveah and tell the citizens to buck their ideas up. After three days praying in the whale/big fish, Jonah tells God he’s sorry, he’s vomited back out, and goes on his way. With the gift of hindsight, this all seems a bit passive aggressive of God, but Old Testament God was quite petty. Just ask Adam and Eve.
In Brian Duffield’s Whalefall – based on the book of the same name by 2026 Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Kraus – a young man named Jay (Austin Abrams) also comes across a cropper of a whale, while out diving in Monastery Bay in search of his father’s remains a year after his suicide. (Monastery Bay has the nickname ‘Mortuary Bay’ due to its reputation as the most dangerous beach in California, but generally this is referring to rip tides rather than the likelihood of being accidentally swallowed by a sperm whale who was innocently trying to eat a giant squid.)
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The introverted Jay had a complicated relationship with his father Mitt (Josh Brolin), an ageing diving enthusiast and local legend who was extremely hard on his son, seeing him as his heir rather than a person in his own right. In flashbacks he’s revealed as an imposing, single-minded parental figure who clashes frequently with Jay, and his gradual decline due to lung cancer only further exacerbates tensions in their relationship. After shutting down in the wake of Mitt’s suicide at sea, Jay returns home from college determined to retrieve his father’s body to bring closure to his mother and sisters, even though it seems obvious that Mitt made the decision to die in the ocean because it was where he was happiest.
In a stroke of extreme bad luck, Jay is swallowed by a sperm whale after getting between him and his lunch. The set piece of this moment is genuinely thrilling, but sadly underserved by dingy cinematography and lighting; while the ocean is understandably dark, some of the dramatic tension of Whalefall goes out of the window when you can’t see what on earth is going on. Things don’t improve much once poor Jay is in the whale’s digestive tract, both from a visual standpoint and a survival perspective. With just under an hour of oxygen in his tank, Jay has to form an escape plan quickly while contending with stomach acid, darkness, and the not-quite-dead squid.
Duffield has an uphill struggle matching the outrageously goofy premise of Whalefall with the grounded drama of the film’s family dynamic. While Austin Abrams – recently the tragic hero of Zach Cregger’s excellent Resident Evil – is well cast and likable as Jay, there’s a sort of cloying sombreness about the film’s tone, particularly given how unpleasant Mitt is towards his son in the plentiful flashbacks. It’s difficult to reconcile this with the earnest third act feature of Jay talking to the disembodied spirit of his father…which is also the voice of the whale he’s trapped inside. The tonal mismatch keeps Whalefall way out of ‘unhinged b‑movie’ territory but still swimming far from the warm shore of ‘strangely moving’.
