By M.V. Moorhead
This much, at least, can be said for Whalefall: It isn’t a cheat. Early on, the movie gives us what it promises, a fairly convincing depiction of a scuba diver being eaten alive by a sperm whale.
For the 90 minutes or so that follows this harrowing scene, the movie, directed by Brian Duffield (Spontaneous) from a novel by Daniel Kraus, shows us this kid’s struggles to escape the whale’s gut. At the same time, he’s locked in a spiritual struggle to come to terms with his late father.
I found it all… a little hard to swallow.
But maybe… I just needed some time to digest it.
Our hero, Jay (Austin Abrams of the new Resident Evil and Euphoria), is haunted by a fraught relationship with his ranting, explosive old salt of a dad, played in flashbacks by Josh Brolin. He’s also an avid outdoorsman. While diving near his beautiful home on the California coast, the young man intrudes on a life and death grapple between a whale and a giant squid.
The whale accidentally gobbles Jay up with the squid – much like we might inadvertently eat a bug that landed in our calamari salad. Then, in the atmospheric club lighting of the leviathan’s innards, we see Jay frantically try to give his host indigestion sufficient to regurgitate him before his air runs out.
I can’t say that Whalefall bored me, and I definitely was invested in seeing poor Jay get sprung. I know, furthermore, there are possibly factual stories of people who’ve survived being swallowed whole by whales, notably sailor James Bartley, a “real-life Jonah” who in 1891 was said to have been cut out of the belly of a dead whale who had ingested him days earlier.
Even so, Whalefall seems ridiculous. This is not, of course, always a dealbreaker with an adventure picture. But the movie also regards itself with somber, earnest seriousness, and it gets a bit muddled and new-agey in its later stretches, with Dad talking to Jay, maybe in his head, maybe from the spirit world, maybe through the great sea mammal itself?
The specifics of Jay’s ultimate escape plan are a little vague and evasive, too. This may have to do with (understandable) societal guilt over the long, unhappy relationship between humans and whales, a sensibility which complicates any depiction of violence against the great animals.
Brolin is painfully believable as this sort of furious, anger-as-default maniac. Abrams is easy to root for as the hapless Jay. I wanted him out of the belly of the beast, although after more than an hour of listening to him grunt and groan and gasp and moan and beseech his father, what I really wanted were the closing credits.
