PG-13-rated films are generally permitted one F-bomb before they get slapped with the more restrictive rating. No quasi-family-friendly offering has ever spent this precious chit more judiciously than the new Whalefall, wherein rising star Austin Abrams (Weapons, Resident Evil) screams at a passing tour boat, “I’M IN THE FUCKING WHALE!”
Fact check: True! More than half of this trim 106-minute epic takes place in a sperm whale’s gullet and/or a sperm whale’s belly, locales I’m reasonably certain we’ve not seen on film since Pinocchio. That alone gives Whalefall a welcome sprig of novelty, though it becomes too clumsy and risible in its final 15 minutes to warrant a full-throated recommendation. It also suffers by not having Adele belt out a smoky banger of a title song (though it does feature a 007-style cold open before the title appears). Part 127 Hours-style survival thriller, part Field of Dreams-coded Making Posthumous Peace with Dad flick, part Nolanesque fantasia of slippery timelines and synchronized epiphanies, all marine gastrointestinal nightmare, Whalefall—which Daniel Kraus adapted, with co-writer-director Brian Duffield, from his own 2023 novel—is truly its own warm-blooded beast. Call it Ishmael.
If nothing here is as risible as it might’ve been, the Force ghost-style inspirational bromides (and later, hilariously specific instructions) Abrams’ college-kid Jay receives from his recently deceased paterfamilias every time he passes out due to dwindling oxygen come perilously close. That father is named Mitt, which captures his leathery nature. Naturally, he’s embodied in flashback by Josh Brolin, turning in another tatted-up, goateed, tough-love-or-is-it-abuse-dispensing performance differentiated only from the one he just gave in Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars by his very specific dialogue about tides, scuba tanks, dive regulators, and … whales.
“Do you know that when whales die they create an entire ecosystem?” he asks his landlubbin’ son, in one of Mitt’s vanishingly few moments of serenity. In other flashbacks, he crushes freshly emptied beer cans on his forehead and tells a preteen Jay that bullies hassle him because he’s “prey.” Some years later, Abrams’ Jay attempts to bond with the now-terminally ill Mitt on a boat trip, but it goes so badly that he dives into the frigid water to swim home rather than spend another minute with the old man. His father screams after him that he’ll never make it to shore because his boy’s got “soft lungs!”
It’s in an attempt to prove his lungs are, in fact, as diamond-hard as his resolve that Jay chooses, 20 minutes into the picture, to go back into the sea in an attempt to retrieve his father’s bones. Though Brolin once again proudly displays his still-ripped-at-almost-60 physique in the many scenes wherein he berates his son for sharing his species’ evolutionary preference for dry land, his character is supposed to be dying. This is why he takes a header into Davy Jones’ Locker while his best pal John Ortiz sobs beside him just a few minutes into the movie. Mitt wants to go out on his own terms. (Elizabeth Shue has a few lines, too, as Zara, Mitt’s bereaved.)
Meanwhile, in the digestive acid-filled present, Austin is passed from one section of the whale’s digestive tract to the next, occasionally able to see the cell walls surrounding him by the light of a conveniently bioluminescent jellyfish that has also had the rotten luck to get swallowed.
My screening of Whalefall played in a Dolby auditorium, where the massive screen and especially the guttural sound system created as visceral a simulation of the experience of being Boba Fett in the Sarlacc Pit as I’ll ever need. Inevitably, this will feel less gross but also less compelling in your living room. Eventually Jay begins speaking, through his regulator, to his glow-in-the-dark pal. Their romance is brief and circumstantial, not a slow fostering of intimacy and mutual respect like Tom Hanks’ affair with Wilson the Volleyball in Cast Away.
Again, Whalefall is due credit for novelty. I’ve never seen a movie that features a deus ex orca before. It lost me only when Force Ghost Brolin goes into full drill sergeant mode, presenting his soft-lunged soft boy with a hilarious solution to his extreme food insecurity, by which I mean his insecurity about becoming food.
This is also, it must be said, a very credible visual effects showcase. No film has presented whales with more curiosity or empathy since James Cameron subtitled their dialogue (in Papyrus font!) in Avatar: The Way of Water. Until Big Jim allows himself to be swallowed by a whale for the purpose of filming an IMAX documentary, Whalefall remains your best and only chance to experience one of our planet’s most majestic and mysterious creatures from the inside.
Whalefall (106 mins., PG-13) opens today, Oct. 16.
