Brian Duffield's Whalefall Spends Two Acts Being Incredible and One Losing the Plot

Austin Abrams gets eaten alive by a sperm whale, and I was so into it, right up until I wasn't.

Here's a premise that should not work and absolutely should not be as gripping as it is: a guy gets swallowed whole by a sperm whale and has one hour of oxygen to claw his way out before he suffocates inside a living animal. That's the whole movie.

It's 127 Hours if you took away the canyon and replaced it with the digestive tract of the ocean's largest predator. I heard the concept, saw a clip of Austin Abrams getting gulped down, and knew I had to watch this immediately.

I'm also officially an Austin Abrams girl now, which I did not see coming this year. He crushed it in the Resident Evil reboot, and here he's carrying an entire movie almost single-handedly from inside a whale's stomach. The kid has range and nerve.

So between the nightmare premise and the cast, my expectations were sky-high. The movie met them for about two-thirds of its runtime and then face-planted so hard I actually winced.

TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿🍿/5

What's This About?

Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) is a young man wrecked by the death of his father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), a gruff, sea-loving man he had a brutal, complicated relationship with, who took his own life by drowning.

Jay goes scuba diving off the California coast, desperate to recover any trace of his dad, a body, a bone, anything. What he finds is a sperm whale hunting a giant squid, and he ends up swallowed in the chaos. Now he's trapped in the belly of the beast with a dwindling air supply, and the only thing that might save him is everything his difficult father ever taught him.

It's based on the bestselling novel by Daniel Kraus, who co-wrote the script with director Brian Duffield.

Why I Was Obsessed (For a While)

The survival stuff is genuinely phenomenal. If your particular nightmare is being eaten alive, this movie will reach into your chest and squeeze.

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The sequence where the whale swallows Jay is one of the most intense things I've seen all year, a perfect storm of claustrophobia and body horror and sheer panic. The CGI during that scene is fantastic, and the sound design? Unreal. The echolocation pulses rumbling through the theater genuinely made my stomach drop. This is a "see it in the best theater you can find" movie purely for the audio.

Smart call on the filmmakers' part, too. In the book, the stomach feels cramped and suffocating, and I kept wondering how they'd shoot that without it being two hours of a guy curled in a ball. They gave the space a little more room to breathe, which sounds counterintuitive for a claustrophobia movie but totally works on screen.

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Josh Brolin is excellent as the dad, and the flashback structure is clever. While Jay is trapped, we cut to memories of him and his father, and those memories double as survival clues, little lessons from the past that suddenly unlock how to get through the next horrifying obstacle.

When the flashbacks are doing their thing, the father-son core of this story genuinely lands. Brolin plays a man who was hard to love and harder to lose, and those scenes have real weight.

Where Brian Duffield's Whalefall Inevitably Falls Apart

Okay. The problem. For the entire time Jay is inside the whale, he has to keep his regulator mouthpiece clamped between his teeth, because, you know, no air down there. In the book, that's fine, because you get his whole inner monologue on the page, all his terror and grief and realization.

On screen, your lead actor physically can't use his face or voice to carry the emotional climax of the movie. So the big cathartic father-son payoff the whole film has been building toward gets hamstrung right when it needs to soar. The flashbacks set up all this gorgeous emotional tension, and then the present-day scenes can't stick the landing because the guy has a hunk of rubber in his mouth.

And the third act gets WEIRD. Like, "did someone spike my popcorn" weird. It swings hard for something trippy and surreal and metaphorical, cheesy infrared whale visuals and all, and it completely lost me. In a book, your brain fills in the abstract stuff with whatever it needs to make it work.

On screen, you're stuck looking at exactly what they chose to show you, and what they chose did not land for me at all. People who were fully on board for the tense survival thriller are going to hit that final stretch and go, "Wait, what is happening right now?"

The movie also runs long. Cut 15 minutes off the back end, and you'd have something much tighter and more devastating.

My Final Verdict

When Brian Duffield's Whalefall is a survival thriller, it's gripping, gross, and genuinely stressful in the best way, with killer sound design and a lead performance that holds the whole thing together.

When it tries to bring its emotional story full circle, it fumbles, partly because of a creative choice that handcuffs its own star. It's awesome until it isn't, and that ending keeps it from being the knockout it clearly wanted to be.

Worth a watch for the premise and for Abrams, but temper your expectations for the final act. Catch it loud, bail before it gets trippy.