Whalefall (2026), Dir. Brian Duffield
Starring: Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin
Survival/Thriller | PG-13 | 1 hr 46 min | 3.5/5 stars 
How hard is it for a son to connect with his emotionally unavailable father? Well, how hard is it to escape from the belly of an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale after it swallows you alive? In Whalefall, a young scuba diver does both, and to the film’s credit, it’s hard to tell which is more stressful.
Whalefall is adapted from the 2023 novel of the same name by Daniel Kraus, who also co-wrote the screenplay with director Brian Duffield. The novel’s film rights prompted a bidding war almost immediately upon the book’s release, and for good reason. A scuba diver that gets swallowed up by a whale while trying to recover the body of his father, who committed suicide rather than succumbing to mesothelioma — that’s a thriller AND a tearjerker, theoretically.
For a premise as biblically recognizable as a man being swallowed by a whale or large fish, surprisingly few storytellers have attempted to depict it. One such sequence is found in Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), in which the puppet finds and rescues Geppetto from the inside of a sperm whale.
Unfortunately for Whalefall’s central scuba diver, Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams), there’s not enough room in a real sperm whale’s inner cavity to cozy up and fish like Geppetto did while waiting for Pinocchio’s rescue. There’s almost no room at all for Jay, even without accounting for the stomach acid and a terrifying giant squid, also inside the whale.
People will watch this film for the whale, and the whale will not disappoint. In those sequences, Whalefall is doing things that have never been done before in film, to great effect. It truly feels, tangibly, like you’re watching Jay get swallowed and digested by a whale. The shifting, crushing interior muscles; the pools of saltwater and goo; the darkness sparingly broken apart by sea life bioluminescence — it all feels real and practical. That goes for Jay’s rising panic, too, and every sharp breath, muffled scream, and mangled body part feel all too painfully real.
Jay’s physical ordeal is a not-so-subtle metaphor for the strained relationship with his legendary scuba diver dad, Mitt (Josh Brolin). As shown through periodic and progressively hallucinogenic flashbacks while Jay is stuck inside the whale, Mitt wanted to prepare his son for the cruel world. These lessons didn’t leave much room for emotional sympathy or connection, but they did give Jay some convenient tips to attempt an escape. Jay’s father helped drive him away from home, eventually literally, as Jay abandons the California coast in the wake of a brutal incident.
Jay’s desperate physical struggle with the whale mirrors his desperate emotional struggle with his dad, which is not a subtle metaphor. Without the benefit of having read the novel, it’s easy to assume the father-son relationship is explored with much more depth and nuance than the film can muster. Counter-intuitively, that was seemingly the hardest part to adapt. It’s not that those moments are uniformly bad, and the flashback sequences are quite good, mostly.
However, especially later in the film, there are moments that feel forced and even some that cross over into goofy. For example, as the whale-induced effects of deepwater nitrogen poisoning takes effect, Jay begins speaking directly to the disembodied voice of his father, who, spoiler alert, might have become one with the whale.
It’s unclear whether that voice is just in Jay’s head or if it is actually a creature of science fiction, but that’s not really the point. In a film otherwise obsessed with making Jay’s experience feel real, this voiceover about his relationship with his father and the direct conversation with Whale-Mitt do not feel real, in such a way that takes the viewer out of the film. That doesn’t last too long, though, and the emotional beats still hit home enough to let Whalefall shine.
Has anyone actually been swallowed by a whale? According to scientists, no. But, if someone had, it would probably look a lot like Whalefall.
