Photo: Jennifer Clasen/20th Century Studios
Whale fall is a film that takes place primarily in the panting guts of a sperm whale. Before getting into the hows and whys of the predicament its hero finds himself in, it’s worth noting a few things about the film’s pedigree. It is based on the 2023 novel of the same name by Daniel Kraus, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Downabout American soldiers in World War I who discover a fallen angel on a battlefield in France. Kraus has one foot in the film business, having written books with Guillermo del Toro and completed George A. Romero’s unfinished manuscript for the 2020 novel. The Walking Deadand he co-wrote the screenplay for Whale fall with its director, Brian Duffield. Duffield himself got his start as a writer, although as of 2023 he has gained attention for directing Nobody will save youan alien invasion movie starring Kaitlyn Dever that managed to garner acclaim even after being sent straight to streaming. This is a film that has more on its mind than just a high-concept premise, is what I’m saying, although the outrageousness of that premise really can’t be ignored. A fucking whale swallows a guy whole! It gets stuck in his stomach!
According to my calculations, it takes about half an hour to Whale fall for tummy time. Until then, it’s a straightforward family drama about heartbreak and regret that features some striking imagery, especially when it comes to depicting velvety depth. Abrams, here for more torment after spending resident Evil fleeing infected mutants and impending fatherhood, plays Jay Gardiner, the youngest of three siblings and the only boy in 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 with his own son. Mitt, who suffered from mesothelioma, committed suicide 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 to attend college and only returned to California. on the anniversary of Mitt’s death. Possessed by a determination that he can’t really explain, he sets off alone one morning with his old diving equipment, with the intention of finding his father’s still lost remains. There, among the kelp beds at the edge of the Monterey Submarine Canyon, he encounters a sperm whale that has ventured out of the depths in pursuit of a giant squid.
When a stray tentacle grabs his ankle, Jay is pulled into the whale’s mouth with the squid and wakes up in the first hard-walled chamber of his stomach with enough oxygen to last him an hour. Whale fall is a movie about trying to get out from inside a whale that’s doing its best to digest you, and also a heartfelt movie about heartbreak, and it never manages to blend those two aspects, no matter how mightily it tries. I’m not entirely on board the Abrams train yet, but he reliably holds the screen alone in the whale’s claustrophobic interiors, where the organic walls always threaten to close in. As Jay tries to avoid being crushed by the whale’s stomach in one shaking chamber or dissolved by acid in the next, Abrams comes up with reactions that seem as plausible as possible in a completely unimaginable situation. He’s better at being funny than being in pain – a moment in which Jay carries on a one-sided emotional conversation with a bioluminescent jellyfish is a highlight – but when he needs to project agony, he brings it, and he brings it by screaming in pain or laughing deliriously around a scuba regulator.
It seems silly to say that this movie about being swallowed alive is more gruesome than you might expect, but sometimes Whale fall veers into body horror in its contemplations not only of what it means to become food, but also of being inside a creature far more adapted to the hostilities of the sea than we are, and capable of diving 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 harsh on the son he wanted to raise in his image while punishing him for his perceived inadequacies. Brolin can play a compulsive tough guy like Mitt in his sleep and is completely believable as a blue-collar guy who can’t help but push his kid around in the name of love, who talks to Jay about nature and then mocks the boy for his lack of interest in his father’s worldview. But by condensing their relationship to these interludes, Whale fall transforms their father-son conflict into something archetypal and sometimes hackneyed – Mitt screaming “Limp lungs!” ” at Jay, when Jay jumps off their boat to get away from him, it feels more like a laugh line than a permanent breakup moment.
Yet there’s something about the earnestness with which the film finally intersects its daddy issues and cetacean issues. This happens in a sequence of haunting images and hallucinatory conversations that are admirable, even if it doesn’t work. There are plenty of movies these days about trauma, but it’s rare to see one that’s so literal about the connection. Whale fall goes all the way, unabashedly turning the idea of a young man trapped in his father’s toxic masculinity into a text – and a potential tomb of whale flesh from which he must attempt to escape.
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