As if we needed another reason to fear the ocean, here’s writer-director Brian Duffield’s Whalefall. In the film, a sperm whale accidentally swallows a young man, a truly horrifying thing to consider. But it gets worse: the guy survives and then has to escape. There’s more to the film than that, but I really can’t underline that part enough.
Co-written with Daniel Kraus, Whalefall does have a broader narrative. The film opens with Mitt (Josh Brolin) nearly hacking up a lung before jumping into the sea in a weighted vest. It’s a rough introduction, to say the least, before jumping ahead a year to his son, Jay (Austin Abrams), still grieving. In that state, Duffield steers his protagonist back to the ocean—and inevitably traps us in a whale of emotions. Setting the film’s plot mechanics aside, it’s a novel premise, part Old Testament Jonah and part Pinocchio, though not exactly a visual feast—there are only so many ways to light a whale’s innards. In close-up for much of the film, Abrams has the right mix of fragility and fresh-faced determination to carry the narrative weight; we’re pulling for him to figure it out in real-time. In expected flashbacks, meanwhile, Brolin dutifully doles out hard truths about life—on the ocean and in general. This combination of nautical derring-do and familial sentimentality clicks together easily. And while we can’t quite predict which parts of Mitt’s advice will come in handy, we know it will.
Perhaps the word “derring-do” oversells it. At times, Whalefall is a gnarly movie, one far less concerned with adventure than queasy reality. Though poor Jay can’t move around much, Duffield’s film still gives us a sense of scale, of the beast and the deeper sea. Now, I didn’t need a movie to tell me being eaten by a whale would not be enjoyable. But to its credit, the film manages to stay above water anyway.
