Whalefall review
Dealing with some stuff. Inside of a whale.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Whalefall
Directed by Brian Duffield
Screenplay by Brian Duffield and Daniel Kraus
Starring Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin and Elisabeth Shue
Whalefall Review
There are two kinds of people in this world. People who saw the trailer for Whalefall and said “a dude gets swallowed by a whale? I’ll be seated opening night”. And then there’s everybody else. A dude gets swallowed by a whale. How hard do we really need to think about whether or not you should see this movie? Are there a lot of “dude gets swallowed by a whale movies” out there? Are you burned out from all the movies where dudes get swallowed by whales? I can think of four movies where someone gets stuck inside a bathroom for the entire movie…but I can’t think of one other time someone spent the majority of a movie inside of a whale.
So, is Whalefall, with its fantastic premise, a good movie?
I don’t know. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s probably a bit more ridiculous than you’d want from a movie where a dude is inside a whale. Most of that can be chalked up to hallucinations suffered by Jay (Austin Abrams) as he deals with a limited amount of oxygen, a sudden dive deep into the ocean, and…you know…being inside of a whale. But not all of it can. There’s some weird stuff here that isn’t the product of Jay’s psychosis and the daddy issues he carried into the water with him. My favorite moment is when his father (Josh Brolin) looks directly into the camera and says the ridiculous title of the movie. Hallucination? Sure. But, come on…that’s fourth wall breaking absurdity. And, if I’m being honest, I was kind of here for it.
Whalefall begins with the death of Jay’s father. He’s terminal and decides to end things on his own terms…but drowning himself in the ocean he loves so much. Seriously, you’ve never seen a man love the ocean more. We see flashbacks to Jay and his father before the former was inside of a whale and the latter was at the bottom of the ocean…and the only two things you need to know about him is that he loves the ocean and was a bad father. The degree to which these things are true is dialed up to a comical degree. Whenever a scene cuts to their relationship…you can be sure Josh Brolin will be yelling at his son or waxing poetic about the ocean. Sometimes he does both at the same time. The character would be a full on cartoon character if Brolin wasn’t so good at performing it. … It’s still kind of a cartoon character.
But that’s ok. We get what the character is and what his relationship with his son was…so Whalefall accomplishes its mission and it’s even somewhat entertaining to watch. Jay’s father was beloved by fellow ocean enthusiasts…and his wife and two daughters. Only Jay carries the disappointment of a father who, frankly, was a tool to him. It’s what kept Jay away when his father was dying…and what drives Jay into scuba gear a year after his father’s death to search out his remains.
At which point he gets swallowed by a whale.
I felt like that deserved its own space because it’s the best part about Whalefall. Yes…we watch Jay wrestle with his issues throughout the movie…yes all of those tough lessons pay off eventually…and, yes, eventually he starts talking to his father as he nears his own death and hallucinates his brain out. But I feel it’s important to remember that even if the backstory is a cartoonishly done and the third act is a collection of very strange moments, Whalefall is a movie where a dude gets swallowed by a whale. So, you should see it. Because that part is really, really cool.
The swallowing sequence was largely in the first trailer for Whalefall. It’s exactly what I would have done because it’s awesome and sells the movie to anyone interested in that. Jay gets himself tangled up with an octopus who is on the sperm whale’s menu…and spends the next hour trapped inside of that whale. He has roughly an hour of oxygen left. Oh…and that octopus is still alive in there too. Whalefall is one of those movies where you kind of look at it and ask, “is this a horror movie?” And you know it isn’t…but then you watch Jay fight with an octopus inside of a whale and think…but it is…right? It’s a survival story either way. One that is often good and almost as often ridiculous. I think in a good way…but mileage will vary.
Jay squeezes through some whale holes and ends up dealing with pools of stomach acid…or whatever the equivalent would be for a whale. Full disclosure…I don’t know anything about the inside of whales. I’m not certain Whalefall does either. It’s very well-lit inside of this whale. The result is some decent body horror and a movie that could be pretty triggering for anyone with claustrophobia. But it brings up a larger point. This is a movie where a dude is swallowed by a whale. If that sold you on the film…and it should have…do you care if it gets even more ridiculous? If the stomach of a whale is professionally lit? Or if Jay starts talking to the whale like it his dead father? Or if that whale has some of the most absurd things happen to it within the same hour that Jay is stuck inside?
Probably not, right? If you were in for the dude inside the whale story…you’re probably fine with some wackiness surrounding it. Which, oddly, puts the grounded parts of Whalefall into the crossfire of stuff it didn’t really need. You’re going to be more entertained by Jay talking to his whale/dad while hallucinating than you are going to care about any closure Jay gets from the exchange. You aren’t going to care about the letter he never read or what his sisters think of anything or the flashbacks to his falling out with his father. I mean…you might. I don’t know you. What I cared about was watching a guy crawl around the inside of a whale, slowly losing his mind while the movie matched the absurdity of that sentence with ideas that I genuinely can’t tell if they were meant to be as absurd as they turn out to be.
That’s my kind of a “dude gets swallowed by a whale” movie.
I hope he gets swallowed by something else in a sequel.
Scare Value
A guy goes looking for his father’s remains and ends up inside of a whale. There are no new ideas, are there? Seriously though…what makes Whalefall stand out from other “inside of another living creature” movies is that it tries to be both absurd and grounded…and it’s the grounded parts that don’t fit. I feel like they should have seen that coming when they greenlit a story of a DUDE WHO GETS SWALLOWED BY A WHALE. Luckily, there is more than enough absurdity to deliver THE must watch dude gets swallowed by a whale movie of the year.
3/5
Whalefall Link
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