“The odds of being swallowed by a whale are not zero.” That little factoid is from a promotional tweet by the distributor of Whalefall, a new film about a guy who gets swallowed by a whale. Canny advertising according to every metric, seemingly struggling against the suggestion that the very premise of the movie is intrinsically preposterous, not to be taken seriously. Ironically, the thing that ultimately scuttles Whalefall is that it takes itself slightly too seriously, preferring a solemn story of sons grappling with fathers and a heaping dose of trauma metaphor onto the story of a guy trying to extricate himself from Monstro’s tumtum.
Austin Abrams is Jay, a young diver caught in a grief trap. His domineering father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), who taught him everything about life on and under the water, has taken his own life by plummeting into the sea rather than succumbing to cancer. Despite their wildly fraught relationship, the pull of guilt drives Jay — who vowed to never dive again — to put the wetsuit back on and search for Mitt’s remains. While down there, he witnesses a huge squid in a losing battle with a massive sperm whale, and when Jay’s equipment gets tangled in the squid’s tentacles, he’s sucked in and swallowed by the whale. Trapped and seriously injured, he’ll have to remember his father’s survival advice and come to grips with dad’s legacy if he’s going to escape.
The actual nuts and bolts of the narrative, with Jay making multiple attempts to break out of his gloopy prison, are the best and most amusing parts of Whalefall. He considers using the rear exit, so to speak, but realizes that will likely end in his digestion. At one point he “befriends” a bioluminescent jellyfish and uses its light to find handholds in an attempt to climb out the way he came in. It’s pretty ingenious stuff, and full of squicky grue. The insides of the whale are depicted with multiple cramped, rubbery waterlogged sets augmented with animatronic and digital work, which mostly looks good (although a few of the more ambitious moments feel dodgy). It’s not addressed how any of this doesn’t take place exclusively in pitch blackness, but that’s a nitpick.
Unfortunately, as Whalefall progresses and Jay is affected further by lack of air and injury, his delirium pushes the film into more well-trod territory. He imagines that his father’s soul somehow inhabits his giant undersea captor, and repeatedly hears Mitt’s voice advising, hectoring, and eventually forgiving him. All of the locked-room, trapped-in-a-whale stuff works so well that it’s a shame that the film has to turn to some extremely hackneyed bad dad issues melodrama, and the more it anchors itself to Jay’s grief, the duller things get. This latter half is at least salvaged in part by Abrams — currently the reigning champion of getting beat to shit in esoteric genre fare — who mostly spends the entire time talking to himself and/or screaming in pain and frustration. But otherwise his flashbacks with Brolin — who can do the gruff dad in his sleep — land as pretty standard stuff. By the end, as Mitt gravely describes the meaning of the film’s title, Whalefall has somehow become bizarrely generic despite the alleged ridiculousness of its story. It would be almost impressive if it weren’t so disappointing.
DIRECTOR: Brian Duffield; CAST: Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Javy Levy; DISTRIBUTOR: 20th Century Studios; IN THEATERS: October 16; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 38 min.
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