Whalefall ★★½

After directing the impressive No One Will Save You, an alien invasion film with just five lines of spoken dialogue, writer-director Brian Duffield returns with a more conventionally told film, Whalefall. Adapted from the novel by Daniel Kraus, Whalefall follows Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) as he returns home for the one-year anniversary of his father Mitt’s (Josh Brolin) death. The pair had a turbulent relationship. As Jay’s sisters recount the goofy ways in which Mitt would play with them as children, all Jay can remember are their fights and Mitt’s tough lessons. An expert scuba diver, Mitt directed most of his intense version of parenting toward Jay on teaching him to survive in the water. They live in Monterey Bay and, as Mitt believes, the ocean is a way of life. “It provides,” he says to Jay on numerous occasions. Mitt’s philosophical and spiritual connections to the water demand a respect for the power and fear they instill, something he wanted to pass on to Jay but something that only served to drive a wedge between them.

Now, as Jay returns home, he cannot bring himself to confront some of the realities of his father’s passing. A trip to the cemetery with his mother Zara (Elisabeth Shue) finds Jay staying in the car. Reminiscing sessions with sisters Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd) leave Jay explaining why he cannot forget one horrible night on the family boat with Mitt and why he has not read the letter that their dad had written for him. The one area they all agree on is the lack of closure provided by how their father died. It is no mystery, as Mitt very clearly jumped off his boat with the intention of drowning. He had been diagnosed with mesothelioma and was long down the road of enduring this savage illness. “He was not one to die in a hospital bed,” the siblings conclude but the empty coffin in the ground due to his body never being recovered looms large in their mind. Jay has come home for one reason: to find his dad’s body. Jay’s plan finds numerous pitfalls before he even hits the ocean with his father’s best friend and business partner Hewey (John Ortiz) making small talk with Jay when he goes to fill his oxygen tank and, worse, something mysterious happening at the beachfront. The cops are there in the distance and an apparent official is tearing down the road toward where Jay parked his car by the beach access point. Hurrying toward the water to the point that he even forgets his gloves, Jay is in no mood to be stopped, no matter the reason for the commotion. As he will soon discover, his headstrong and determined nature has gotten him into trouble: a sperm whale is close to shore and, soon, Jay will find himself fighting for his life inside its stomach alongside a squid.

Whalefall often feels like a film struggling to find a way to be itself. The main conceit is about Jay being inside this whale, but how does a film like this fill the rest of its runtime? He struggles, moves through the various chambers of the whale’s insides, and fights against the digestive process trying to survive. He uses his cunning and knowledge passed down from his father to stay alive, counting down the minutes of oxygen he has left as a running timer within the film. The cinematography from Aaron Morton and the special effects that bring to life this whale’s stomach make for a claustrophobic and visually intense experience, a nerve jangling watch that makes one want to claw out of their skin at times as he gets chewed and passed along from chamber-to-chamber. It is exciting and as wild a premise as Whalefall has, Duffield succeeds in making this unbelievable threat into something credible and tangible. It feels ludicrous, but then inside that whale, this survival horror feels like something akin to The Descent – though far less bloody – as he tries to shimmy through tight passageways and turns to items he finds in the whale’s stomach – such as a jellyfish or a bag of steel wool – to make his perilous trek somehow easier.

But, as noted, Whalefall tries to find a way to tell this story that is not just all-whale. It is also a father-son film with plenty of flashbacks and, eventually, delusions/hallucinations within the whale as Jay’s mind seeks closure. The main draw of Whalefall is in the whale. The action inside is intense and thrilling. As a pack of orcas hunt the sperm whale in which Jay is stuck, it is even nightmarish and possessing a biological almost wildlife documentary thrill that makes for a fascinating angle. The father-son element, comparatively, feels strained when it leaves the tangible. Brolin and Abrams are great together. They exude that turbulent relationship that comes from a father trying too hard to make his son into a man, a father so terrified of screwing up that he screws up, and a father trying to cure the parts of himself that he sees in his son until he drives that son away. It is powerful and well-presented. Abrams has a quiet, repressive nature to his emotions, wearing them in his face and never quite having the words to express the way in which his relationship with his father differs from the man his sisters knew. However, Whalefall pushes it too far. As Jay gets deeper into his journey inside the whale and the time grows short for him to escape, his mind wanders and Whalefall goes more into metaphor and supernatural spirituality about death, the ocean, and grief. It is emotionally manipulative to a degree, but the issue is more about it being dramatically strained, a desperate angle to bring its journey for closure and survival to a head that is more likely to leave one gobsmacked that Whalefall would take this cloying path than to be genuinely moved.

Despite this, director Brian Duffield’s Whalefall is a thrilling film. Austin Abrams continues his run of films putting him through absolute insanity, though compared to the recent Resident Evil, Whalefall never manages to be as enthralling. Abrams is a star-in-the-making, continuing to ascend and show a genuine depth to his performances that elevate every film he is in. Together with the always reliable Josh Brolin, he builds a strong foundation for Whalefall that it uses for a moving father-son story and a wild survival film. Whalefall strains a bit too much dramatically, while always feeling like a film in search of an angle, a way to pad out its runtime without taxing the viewers’ nerves too much within the whale. This struggle for balance and depth is never quite squared, leaving Whalefall as a good yet fleeting watch.