The One with the Whale
‘Whalefall’ enters the conversation with ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘The Old Man and the sea’… Nah, just kidding.
WhaleFall
Director: Brian Duffield • Writers: Brian Duffield, Daniel Kraus, based on the book by Kraus
Starring: Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz
USA • 1hr 38mins
Opens Hong Kong October 15 • IIA
Grade: B
Like Fall 2: Deadpoint, there is such a thing as a whale fall. It’s when the carcass of a whale sinks to the ocean floor and creates its own ecosystem robust enough to sustain life for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. This isn’t quite the central conceit of Brian Duffield’s Whalefall, the central conceit (and fatal error) is daddy issues, but that doesn’t become a thing until late in the bananas, borderline body horror survival thriller. Before Jay Gardiner – played by Austin Butler in his second, ultra-gooey outing this year – gets his ears blown out and begins sinking while trapped inside a sperm whale, he spends nearly an hour, all that’s in his oxygen tank, trying to get out of the beastie’s gut and getting mutilated and mauled by a very angry squid. It’s fabulous. But then he gets hypoxic and goes all new-agey.
Whalefall is a very simple story, similar in some ways to Buried or 127 Hours or even Heart of the Beast, in which a person – notice it’s always a white guy, only white guys do these dumb things – is trapped in a bizarre situation and has to fight their way out, be it by cell phone, gnawing off a limb or letting the dog do the work; Whalefall doubles down on the high concept. Duffield cranks up the blue bioluminescence, piles on the stomach acids and starts the clock. For most of the run time it’s a wildly amusing ride.
Don’t fuck with squid
Jay is back in his coastal California hometown for the one year anniversary of his father Mitt’s (Josh Brolin, cornering the market on Gruff For Your Own Damn Good father type, the same character he played in The Dog Stars) death by suicide. Mitt, it seems, had a rare form of lung cancer and he was crotchety enough to say fuck you to wasting away and went “home” to the ocean. He was a “the sea is life” type too. After their memorial Jay’s hanging out with his mother Zara (hello Elisabeth Shue) and sisters Eva and Nan (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd), and it’s clear their relationships with Mitt were very different than his. Less combative. Despite his antipathy and simmering rage at Mitt, Jay summons all of the scuba knowledge he inherited from the man and heads out into a choppy ocean one morning to find Mitt’s unrecovered remains. Then he runs into a sperm whale that’s grabbing lunch and we’re off to the races. Jay’s tank has about a hour of oxygen in it when he wakes up inside the whale’s stomach, which is like something from Nope.
Whalefall is a straight B-movie. I mean, come on. The hero of the movie spends the bulk of his time trying to find a way though a whale’s sphincter – or maybe up its blowhole. It’s ludicrous, but that’s okay in a B-movie. Now, however the 2023 book may have handled its themes of loss, guilt, and the classic father-son dynamics… okay the one dynamic about sons who don’t feel they can live up to exacting fathers’ expectations, they’re a little goofier on the screen, and it derails the squelchy, WETA-powered 75 minutes that came before Jay’s internal reconciliation with the ol’ man. It’s not a new spin on daddy issues, it’s not a new demon to wrestle, but the film felt it needed to justify Jay’s run-in with nature when in fact “Guy goes scuba diving, guy gets eaten by whale” was plenty.
Like he did in Resident Evil, Abrams is left almost entirely on his own to carry the story, and its momentum relies on his relatable charm. He’s the polar opposite of Brolin’s old school, post-war masculine ideal, and the shrieks of terror that were so hilarious in Evil are a source of tension here. Whalefall works best when DOP Aaron Morton’s watery, blue-tinted images serve as the canvas for Jay’s physical misery, and highlight the dark, murky depths of the ocean that are every bit as imposing as the blackness of deep space.