You’re Eaten by a Whale, and the Whale Is Toxic Masculinity

Photo: Jennifer Clasen/20th Century Studios

Whalefall is a movie that primarily takes place in the heaving guts of a sperm whale. Before getting into the how and the why of the stomach-centric predicament its hero finds himself in, it’s worth noting a few things about the movie’s pedigree. It’s based on the 2023 novel of the same name by Daniel Kraus, who this year won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down, about American soldiers in World War I who discover an angel who’s been shot down over a battlefield in France. Kraus has a foot in the realm of film, having written books with Guillermo del Toro and completed George A. Romero’s unfinished manuscript for the 2020 novel The Living Dead, and he co-wrote the script for Whalefall with its director, Brian Duffield. Duffield got his start as a writer himself, though in 2023 he got attention for directing No One Will Save You, an alien-invasion movie starring Kaitlyn Dever that managed to drum up acclaim even after having been sent straight to streaming. This is a movie with more on its mind than just a high-concept premise, is what I’m saying, though the outrageousness of that premise really can’t be ignored. A goddamned whale swallows a guy whole! He gets trapped in its belly!

By my count, it takes around half an hour for Whalefall to get to tummy time. Until that point, it’s a straightforward family drama about grief and regret that features some striking imagery, especially when it comes to depicting the velvety deep. Austin Abrams, here for more torment after spending Resident Evil on the run from infected mutants and impending fatherhood, plays Jay Gardiner, the youngest of three siblings, and the only boy of the family. Unlike his sisters, Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd), Jay had a strained relationship with their father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), a grizzled sea dog who got along better with the local Monterey scuba-diving community than he did his own son. Mitt, who’d been struggling with mesothelioma, took his own life a year earlier, strapping on a weight belt and going over the side of a boat into the ocean he loved so much. Jay fled to landlocked Iowa for college and has only come back to California for the anniversary of Mitt’s death. Possessed by a determination he can’t really explain, he sets out alone one early morning with his old dive gear, intent on recovering his father’s still-lost remains. Out there among the kelp beds on the edge of the Monterey Submarine Canyon, he runs instead into a sperm whale that’s ventured out of the deep in pursuit of a giant squid.

When an errant tentacle catches his ankle, Jay gets pulled into the whale’s maw along with the squid and wakes in the tough-walled first chamber of its stomach with enough oxygen to last him an hour. Whalefall is a movie about trying to get out from inside a whale doing its best to digest you, and also a heartfelt movie about grief, and it can never quite get these two aspects to entwine, though it tries, mightily. I’m not entirely onboard the Abrams train yet, but he reliably holds the screen alone in the claustrophobic interiors of the whale, where the organic walls are always threatening to close in. As Jay tries to avoid getting crushed by the whale’s stomach in one quivering chamber or dissolved by acid in the next, Abrams comes up with reactions that feel as plausible as possible in a situation that’s totally unimaginable. He’s better at being funny than he is at suffering — a bit in which Jay carries on an emotional one-sided conversation with a bioluminescent jellyfish is a high point — but when he needs to project agony, he brings it, and he brings it while shrieking in pain or laughing in delirium around a diving regulator.

It sounds silly to say this movie about getting swallowed alive is gnarlier than you’d expect, but at times Whalefall veers into body horror in its contemplations not just of what it means to become food, but to be inside a creature far more suited to the hostilities of the sea than we are, and able to dive to depths we were never meant to see. Less successful are the ways in which Duffield cuts between these near-death experiences and flashbacks to Jay’s relationship with Mitt, who was relentlessly hard on the son he wanted to raise in his image while punishing him for his perceived inadequacies. Brolin can play a compulsive hard-ass like Mitt in his sleep and is thoroughly believable as a blue-collar guy who can’t help but push around his kid in the name of love, who talks at Jay about nature and then taunts the boy for his lack of interest in his dad’s view of the world. But in condensing their relationship to these interludes, Whalefall turns their father-son strife into something archetypal and sometimes hackneyed — Mitt bellowing “Soft lungs!” at Jay when Jay jumps off their boat to get away from him plays more like a laugh line than a moment of permanent rift.

Still, there’s something to the earnestness with which the movie does finally have its daddy issues and its cetacean ones intersect. It happens in a sequence of haunting imagery and hallucinatory conversation that’s admirable, even if it doesn’t work. Plenty of movies are About Trauma these days, but it’s rare to see one that’s willing to be so literal about the connection. Whalefall goes all the way, unapologetically turning the idea of a young man being encased in his father’s toxic masculinity into text — and into a potential tomb of whale flesh he has to try to escape.