Producers: Brian Grazer, Brian Duffield, Jeb Brody and Allan Mandelbaum Director: Brian Duffield Screenplay: Brian Duffield and Daniel Kraus Cast: Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy, Emily Rudd, Sam Franich, Grayson Paul Solomine and Sam Skolnik Distributor: 20th Century Pictures
Grade: D+
Whatever virtues the 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus on which it’s based might possess (and it was pretty well received at the time), this screen adaptation by the author and director Brian Duffield is one of the silliest survival tales ever told on screen. And what makes “Whalefall” even worse is its super-serious approach to the emotional closure sought by a son after the death of his estranged father.
The movie begins, in fact, with the suicide of Mitt Gardiner (Josh Brolin), a grizzled old California seaman, who, after a coughing fit that’s the obligatory movie indicator of terminal illness (thankfully, at least blood doesn’t come up), straps on a weight belt and jumps off his boat as his pal Hewey (John Ortiz), weeps softly with a fishing rod still in his hand. (Mitt’s illness prevents him from diving again, you see, and that’s his whole being.)
Some time later his son Jay (Austin Abrams) returns home to Monterey from his college studies in Iowa, still smarting over his dad’s mistreatment over the years—all misguidedly intended to toughen the boy up for a life on the waves, as we see in repeated flashbacks not only to Jay’s teen years but to what he’d endured as a boy (played at various points by Grayson Paul Solomine and Sam Franich). His somber, taciturn mien doesn’t go unnoticed by his mother Zara (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd), but they celebrate the good times they had with Mitt (playing “Go Fish,” for example), either unaware of the psychological damage Jay suffered at his hands or dismissive of it.
Though Jay declines to visit Mitt’s grave, he’s upset when one of his sisters remarks how sad it was to bury an empty coffin, and decides to dive alone into the canyon off Monastery Beach where his father died despite warnings that the area has been closed for safety reasons. He collects the needed gear from Hewey’s shop, where a young man (Sam Skolnik) lauds Mitt, whose picture hangs on the wall, for having saved his life, sneaks past the police to the shore and enters the water to find his father’s remains and thus prove himself a dutiful son.
For a few minutes he ambles along the ocean floor, but when he reaches the edge of the cliff at the edge of the underwater canyon he’s startled when a monstrous squid rushes up from the depths trying to escape a hungry sperm whale. Jay gets caught in one of the squid’s tentacles and is dragged into the whale’s mouth along with the beast. He grabs onto the whale’s teeth trying to extricate himself, but hasn’t the strength to use them as a ladder to freedom, and is sucked inside the sub-shaped creature with only an hour or so of oxygen in his scuba tank.
The rest of the picture is devoted to his desperate attempt to escape this unlikely situation, which Jonah and Pinocchio suffered before but without quite the same degree of discomfort. Jay must contend with the squishy interior of the whale, with the result that he’s often squeezed by what appear to be throbbing fingers of rubbery flesh. It’s difficult to repress giggles as Jay, gasping for breath, tries different strategies to escape, using the luminous glow of a jellyfish that’s happens to have been scooped up by the whale to light his way.
Presumably the book was more precise in describing the various paths he tries, but the murkiness of the imagery (Aaron Morton was the cinematographer, with Guillaume Rocheron and Mark Hawker handling the visual and special effects, respectively) leaves one pretty much guessing about the internal whale topography being traversed; even one sequence in which the boy climbs up a long tunnel to reach the glimpses of sky is unclear (is this the animal’s blowhole?). Indeed, the only elements of the effects work that impress at all are the external shot of the squid and the whale, especially when the latter is attacked by a pack of orcas; and those are very few.
The upshot is that for all Jay’s grunting and flailing about, exactly what he’s trying to achieve at any point is never entirely clear, and as paced by Duffield and edited by Pietro Scalia, his plight grows increasingly tedious, as well as unpleasant. If you’ve ever seen the photos taken during a colonoscopy, just imagine being stuck in a gigantic version of them brought to a kind of special-effects life for an hour, and you’ll get the idea. (It makes you yearn for the cheesy imagination of “Fantastic Voyage.”) Joseph Trapanese’s score and James Miller’s sound design try to take up the slack, but they can’t engineer pleasurable excitement by themselves.
But that’s not all Jay and the viewer have to endure. There are also those repeated flashbacks to Mitt’s abusive behavior, which grew so bad that it drove Jay to bolt from home and go to Iowa, a decision Mitt derided. Yet now his father’s words come back to the boy, in some mysterious fashion (has his spirit become one with the whale?), and provide the key to his escape. The answer involves an explosion caused by methane produced in the whale’s digestive tract, which deserves mention because “Whalefall” becomes the second film this summer to use the gas as a crucial plot element. The other is “Digger.” Given how disastrously that turned out in both cases, filmmakers might be advised to avoid mentioning methane ever again.
In the end we’re meant to believe that coming through this horrifying ordeal has led to some sort of closure for Jay; he’s apparently come to terms with the incessant bellowing and bullying Mitt meted out over the years because it’s aided in his survival. This is as psychologically dubious as the whole escaping-the-whale narrative is preposterous. And, of course, Jay doesn’t achieve his initial purpose of finding his father’s remains.
This is essentially a two-humans piece, and it doesn’t show either Abrams or Brolin at his best. The former, who was engaging as the dippy delivery driver at the center of “Resident Evil,” is merely dull as emotionally constipated straight-arrow Jay. The role is a change of pace for him, but not in a good way. As for Brolin, he’s merely doing a heightened version of the gruff fellow he played a couple of months back in “The Dog Stars,” and comes across as an obnoxious jerk. It’s hard to find Mitt’s rants anything other than hysterical posturing, however prescient they’re portrayed as being in his son’s eventual survival.
The title of “Whalefall” carries an environmental message, referring to the fact that when a whale dies and sinks to the ocean floor, its carcass nourishes the rise of a whole new ecological system. Presumably the allusion is meant to suggest that Mitt’s corpse is also serving as the source of something new and vibrant, though what such a comparison might mean is at best obscure.
In any event, it can be confidently asserted that the movie sinks to the bottom, but all it generates is a lot of unintended laughs.