Give Whalefall points for its degree of difficulty; it’s not easy to make a movie where most of the time is spent with one man alone inside a whale without getting boring. And Whalefall never is. Beyond that, though, the film has some issues—daddy, and otherwise.
Based on a novel by Daniel Kraus and co-written with director Brian Duffield, Whalefall riffs on the biblical Book of Jonah: a man is forced to reflect on himself while trapped inside a large whale. That man isn’t named Jonah, but Jay, and Austin Abrams plays him as a young man long at odds with his late father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), a diver and boat captain who tried to pressure him into that life.
Duffield directed a little-seen movie that I loved back in 2020 called Spontaneous, a teen horror movie about spontaneous human combustion, which played the topic with dead seriousness. He followed that up three years later with No One Will Save You, an alien-invasion movie I barely remember. With Whalefall, Duffield has graduated to big-budget studio filmmaking.
As the film begins, the father has just died at sea, with his remains never found. While Mitt was well-liked by everyone in town and got along well with his two daughters, he and his son left things on bad terms, with Jay leaving for college in Iowa, implicitly at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Jay goes diving to look for those remains, and in the process, a giant sperm whale swallows him whole. The film’s main section recalls Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, in which James Franco spends most of the movie trapped under a rock in a cave. There’s more action here, especially since he moves around within the whale and encounters other creatures. And there are plenty of flashbacks.
Whalefall soon makes its purpose clear: Letting Jay reflect on his contentious relationship with his late dad, while also pointing out, without subtlety, that anything that could let Jay survive will require specific lessons his father taught him. This is obvious early on, but then Jay starts stating the subtext out loud. Then there’s a secondary, less successful metaphor, in which Mitt is the whale. Despite the biblical pedigree, there’s no hint at any religiosity; his dad is the closest thing this movie has to a God. And while 127 Hours ended with an all-time cinematic moment of catharsis, the ending here is less thrilling.
Abrams, seen in last month’s Resident Evil, nails a tricky part, while Brolin, now clearly in the Grizzled Old Man stage of his career (as seen recently in Weapons and The Dog Stars), capably plays Mitt as a stubborn crank, albeit one with apparent environmentalist, Bernie Sanders-style politics. Elisabeth Shue also shows up briefly as Jay’s mother. In the end, it’s a Field of Dreams-type story in which a man seeks to solve the main problem of the plot while also resolving his issues with his deceased father. What’s the social media cliché? That some men would rather spend days inside the belly of a sperm whale than go to therapy?