Whalefall

Grade: B

A viral tweet from a critic is making the rounds. It says there’s a new genre of film called “Austin Abrams gets into a situation.” It happened just recently with Resident Evil, and you can take it back even further, when he was a victim of witchcraft in Weapons and got kidnapped and interrogated by George Clooney and Brad Pitt in Wolfs. In Whalefall, he is swallowed whole by a whale.

In the ads, Whalefall presents itself as a straightforward, nail-biting survival thriller, but that’s not all there is to it. There’s a family drama aspect, with tensions between a father and a son taking center stage. Austin Abrams plays Jay, who had a rocky relationship with his late father, Mitt, played by his Weapons co-star Josh Brolin. We see Brolin exclusively in flashbacks, and it won’t take long to discern how much more “tough” than “love” there was in his parenting style.

Mitt had a terminal disease. Rather than die in a hospital bed, he chose to jump into the ocean, a place he always loved as a scuba instructor who also conducted boat tours. A year after Mitt’s death, Jay returns to town and decides to find his father’s body. While in the water, his leg gets wrapped up in a squid’s tentacle, and both Jay and the squid are swallowed whole by a giant sperm whale.

The scenes inside the whale are the best parts of the movie. Abrams successfully does a lot of heavy lifting, both in conveying Jay’s intentions and in carrying the story. He finds moments of comedy, like when a jellyfish helps him out as a source of light, and he shakes it like a flashlight with dying batteries when it starts to flicker out (“Come on buddy, wake up. There you go!”). Or when we can’t understand what he’s saying because he has the breathing apparatus in his mouth, yet we know what he means because we recognize the number of syllables in an old familiar expression.

Director Brian Duffield employs dark, quick, disorienting cuts and claustrophobic close-ups during the swallowing sequence, as well as when Jay is transported from one “room” in the whale’s body to another. We don’t automatically know what’s going on, where he’s being taken, whether he’s about to be digested, or whether this other “room” is a better, safer place to be. We are just as confused as he must be.

When Jay finally reads a letter Mitt left for him before taking his life, we don’t see the text or hear Brolin narrate it as Abrams reads. I admired the choice to let what it said be for Jay to know only. Otherwise, the drama on land is often hackneyed and a bit silly. A fellow critic compared it to a lesser This Is Us knockoff. As much as I enjoyed seeing Elisabeth Shue and Jane Levy (A Little Prayer), respectively, as Jay’s mother and sister, Whalefall’s lane is the edge-of-your-seat, fall-release popcorn disaster thriller. Its heart is in the belly of the whale.

Grade: B