Whalefall (United States, 2026)

Sometimes a premise can be so outlandish that it provides an impediment to enjoying a movie. In such cases, it falls on the filmmakers to create sufficient immersion to achieve that ephemeral state often referred to as the "willing suspension of disbelief." Unfortunately, with Whalefall, director Brian Duffield and co-writer Daniel Kraus (who also penned the source novel) fail to get us to that point. Part of the problem is structural, and part is simply that this kind of premise works better in print than on screen. When a movie is definitively neither comedy nor parody, yet snickers can be heard during certain sequences, it becomes apparent that the film is not connecting with its audience. 

Whalefall's structure is a liability. In order to reach the money shot as quickly as possible, the film rushes through the setup and relies on flashbacks to establish characters and relationships. This approach doesn't work for two reasons. First, it fractures the survival tension of a character racing against the clock to escape the whale's gullet. Second, it fails to flesh out the lead before he is swallowed, giving us little reason to care about him before he turns into whale poop. He is sullen and petulant, and we don't understand why until he is actively being digested. 

There are other issues as well, primarily the movie's inconsistent perspective. The majority of the film is essentially first-person, but occasional omniscient shots abruptly show what is happening outside of the whale. Even though they provide context, these cutaways feel jarring and out of place. Finally, even ignoring the scientific and biological impossibilities of the situation, the cavalcade of coincidences is simply too extreme to ignore.

The story fuses the survival ordeal of Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) with his struggle to reconcile his difficult relationship with his late father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). On the anniversary of his dad's suicide (following a terminal diagnosis), Jay returns home to Monastery Beach with the goal of diving to retrieve Mitt's remains. The dive goes disastrously wrong, and he ends up being swallowed by a massive sperm whale. Trapped in its stomach, as he fights to survive, memories of his father and hallucinations caused by rapid pressure changes help him overcome his lingering resentment while providing crucial survival techniques. 

In part because the flashbacks artificially extend the narrative, the inside-the-whale segment (which consumes about an hour of the film's 106-minute running time) feels painfully drawn out. Once Jay is in the belly of Moby Dick, there isn't enough variation to keep the momentum from flagging. The experience is also thoroughly unpleasant, with various physical injuries compounding over time. Although the film neuters many of the actual biological horrors that would occur if a human ended up in this situation, the ordeal is certainly no lark. The end result is that Whalefall feels a lot like an hour of physical torture interrupted by therapy sessions. 

For the second time in a few months (he was also the central figure in the recent Resident Evil reboot), Austin Abrams proves he is a capable actor when on the receiving end of incessant physical punishment. The scenes inside the whale are entirely dialogue-free, forcing him to express himself through facial expressions, screams, and groans. Fun stuff. 

Whalefall is a tough sell. It wants to draw us in with its admittedly outrageous premise, then flip the table and turn into a story of healing and catharsis. But the movie never escapes its web of contrivances, and interrupting the present storyline with flashback sequences gives the audience too much time to consider how unbelievable the current circumstances are. Once the movie lost me—sometime around the point when Jay fights a giant squid inside the whale's stomach—it never won me back. So, although there's more going on here than a grimdark version of Jonah and the whale, the movie struggles mightily to craft a credible scenario or to make the emotional core feel like more than indigestible filler.

Whalefall (United States, 2026)