‘Whalefall’ Review: Josh Brolin Haunts a Swallowed Son in This Queasy, Suffocating Survival Thriller

Watching Whalefall, you could be forgiven for assuming you’re in B-movie territory, one of those underwater disaster pictures that seem to open every other week, usually with a shark or some other aquatic menace circling the cast. A man trapped inside a whale, trying to survive without being digested by the creature in question, sounds exactly like that kind of film. It isn’t, exactly. The movie is based on the novel by Daniel Kraus, a recent Pulitzer Prize winner (for Angel Down) who has also written for Guillermo del Toro and George A. Romero.

That pedigree shows in the way the central hook, a young man trying not to be digested by a gigantic sperm whale, is wrapped in a family tragedy and a story of reconciliation between a dead father and a son who, at the moment he needs it most, finally absorbs the lessons his father never quite knew how to teach him while alive. The film moves back and forth between this minimalist adventure —basically, one guy stuck inside a stomach— and flashbacks to the relationship between the two men.

The story begins in California with the death of Mitt Gardiner (Josh Brolin), a man facing a severe cancer who would rather throw himself into the sea and die there than submit to treatment. He’s a classic man of the water: rugged, stern, covered in tattoos. He’s also deeply connected to nature, and to whales in particular, a devoted reader (John Steinbeck is his favorite) and a respected professional diver. The lessons he tried to pass on to his son Jay (Austin Abrams) never really took. Mitt was always too gruff in delivering them, and Jay never found a way to reach him.

After Mitt’s death, Jay makes a risky decision. Since his father’s body was never recovered, he resolves to dive down and look for it, without telling his mother (Elisabeth Shue) or his sisters. Armed with his scuba gear and everything his dad taught him, he heads out. But an enormous sperm whale has other plans, and shortly after Jay enters the water it swallows him as if it were nothing. He ends up inside the animal, somewhere dark, enclosed and gelatinous in its vast anatomy, with less than an hour of oxygen left to find a way out.

For much of its running time, Whalefall is a movie you watch squinting, with a creeping sense of suffocation. Being stuck inside what appears to be a stomach is not a pleasant sensation, and Duffield spends a good part of the film showing how the kid tries to get by, to avoid dying in the attempt and to find an exit that at times looks impossible.

The movie lets some air into that situation through flashbacks that deepen the father-son relationship. These scenes are triggered mostly by the urgent needs of the trapped Jay, who, remembering some conversation or piece of advice, figures out how to get past the latest obstacle. All of it is shaded by the tensions between the two and by a connection that is more spiritual than realistic, one that builds gradually and carries a whiff of Hamlet (or The Lion King, if you want a more recent reference) in its almost fantastical side.

Whalefall is a curious, uncomfortable film, because the tension it generates is, let’s be honest, a rather unpleasant kind. Most of the movie takes place in the innards of an animal, and however nerve-racking Jay’s predicaments get, it’s a place nobody wants to spend much time in, not even in their imagination. How you respond will depend on your tolerance for spending half a movie under those conditions. Personally, I found it a real slog, the kind of film you’d fast-forward through if the option existed.

It may well be an achievement for Duffield that the audience feels that choking sensation. That, after all, is what a film like this is going for. But it’s hard not to wish the cameras would climb out of this guided tour of the digestive tract, either to show us the outside world or to expand on the relationship between father and son, which is the heart of the story. There, at least, the film stands on solid ground, thanks above all to Brolin’s strong presence as the stern father who couldn’t give his advice well in life but, once dead, becomes something like an oracle. Lessons sometimes arrive when you least expect them. And in the least likely of places.