Sometimes, movies are great works of art. Sometimes, they are about a man who gets stuck inside of a sperm whale. And both of these things should be enjoyed.
“Whalefall,” based on the novel of the same name by Daniel Kraus (who also co-wrote the script for the film), falls into the second category. A year after his cancer-stricken, estranged father (Josh Brolin) dies by throwing himself into the ocean, Jay (Austin Abrams) decides to go looking for his remains. He doesn’t find them – but, he does find himself dragged into the belly of a whale by a particularly vengeful giant squid. Let the chaos commence.
Written and co-directed by Brian Duffield, “Whalefall” is a good old fashioned survival film at its core, one where audiences everywhere get to delight in watching Austin Abrams wheeze through a scuba regulator and fight for his life covered in various types of whale goo (I sure do love watching that guy get into trouble). It’s also a father/son drama, and those are the parts of the script that probably could have used a little more retooling. Still, even with its often thin characterization and healthy amounts of sentimentality, the film skirts by on the strength of Abrams’ and Brolin’s performances – and, I guess, on how much stock you put in the mystic qualities of whales.
This is the second consecutive film that Duffield has directed where the tension mainly rests on the shoulders of one actor on screen alone (Kaitlyn Dever in “No One Will Save You”). Luckily, Abrams excels at the time-honored art of freaking out. Once inside the whale, he fights his way through squid parts, the crushing power of whale innards, and toxic stomach acid galore. He has the type of face that invites chaos – there’s a sweetness to him, but he’s just scummy enough that you believe that getting swallowed by a whale is one on a long list of things that just seem to happen to him. He’s a compelling survivalist, and the inside of the whale is just as slimy and gooey as you’d like.
When we’re taken out of the whale and into the story of Jay’s issues with his father, Mitt, things get a little more complicated. Mitt is a real piece of work. He gets drunk and tries to forcefully crack a beer can over Jay’s skull. He calls Jay “soft” at every opportunity, or a “cog in the industrial machine” when he would rather go to Oceanworld for a friend’s birthday than scuba with dear old dad.
Mitt’s behavior towards Jay explains the simmering anger between them, but it feels odd that Mitt apparently doesn’t act this way towards anyone else. His wife, his daughters, and everyone else in town, seem to like – nay, love! – Mitt, and write off Jay’s unease around him with platitudes like, “I know he was hard on you.” Some of Brolin’s inherent soulfulness sands down some of Mitt’s edges, but it’s difficult to believe that no one is the least bit concerned about his behavior when he appears as such a malevolent force in Jay’s life.
Some of the reasoning for Mitt’s behavior is given to us via exposition dump at the film’s end – which, normally, I would find lazy, but the end of “Whalefall” is so mesmerizingly odd, so strangely cheesy compared to the rest of the film, it was hard to focus on anything else. The relationship between Mitt and Jay is one so fractured it might seem impossible to repair, but Brolin and Abrams commit wholeheartedly to the almost hallucinogenic sentimentality of the film’s ending, it’s hard not to jump in with them. This ending will be the real test for whether “Whalefall” works for you or doesn’t – whether you can handle the schmaltz right alongside the whale guts, or whether the whole endeavor sickens you altogether.
