Whalefall
by Hope Madden
Austin Abrams is having quite a year. First, he battled mutants all over Raccoon City (Resident Evil), and now the poor guy gets swallowed whole by a sperm whale! Dude cannot catch a break!
Whalefall director Brian Duffield, who adapts Daniel Kraus’s book, traps you in there with him and for an hour and 46 minutes, you both struggle with Josh Brolin’s memory, an undigested octopus, time, and digestive fluids as Jay (Abrams) fights to survive.
Brolin is Mitt Gardiner: scuba enthusiast, tourist whale watching boat captain, and Jay’s combative father. Remember how fun it was to watch the two of them fight in Weapons? Well, this is not like that. The sparring Jay and his dad do, and the regret and resentment left behind, echoes loudly through Jay’s entire ordeal.
Were there no underlying metaphor, no larger concept fueling Jay’s fight for survival—no reason to cut away from that pulsating pool of goo now and again—Whalefall would have been little more than a pretty gross survival tale. It is as much a story of surviving grief as surviving the whale. Those daddy issues are a little heavy handed and sappy, sure, but still, you’ve never seen anything like Whalefall.
Editing, creature design, set design, and sound design coalesce to heighten tensions and convince you that you’re surrounded by innards. Crushing, moving, opening, closing, unpredictable innards. Duffield plays with the most primal of fears, and somehow, he and his team have crafted an environment that convinces.
Terrifying, claustrophobic, squishy, and primal, the anxiety Duffield creates is extraordinary. Is it realistic? How the hell do I know? But the filmmaker is committed and confident, and he’s found the perfect hero.
There is just something deeply likeable about Abrams. Whether he’s the laid-back smack head in Weapons or the arrested post-adolescent in Resident Evil, Abrams’s performances are earnest. There’s truth to them, as well as humor. For Whalefall, less humor and more earnestness. In many ways, that’s why the film succeeds. It is unabashedly sincere, and Abrams carries that off perfectly.
