Whalefall is a movie that initially perplexed me. I mean, almost every bit of marketing I’d seen showed me one thing and one thing only: Austin Abrams getting stuck inside a whale. Because of this, I was very intrigued by what could occupy an entire almost two hours; what else did this have to offer? Imagine my surprise when I came to find out it was actually quite little.
Yes, Whalefall deals with deep daddy issues and disappointing your parents, as well as the damage that living vicariously through your children can have on their well-being; this is just like any isolation movie, really. We’ve seen almost this exact story in 127 Hours specifically, just with slightly different issues to work through and a much wetter setting.
We follow Jay Gardiner a little over a year after his father, Mitt, died. Jay has always felt like a disappointment to his father and never lived up to the diving dreams that he had for his child. Intent on finding the remains of his father at the bottom of the ocean, Jay goes diving for the first time in years - since his father died, in fact. When Jay gets caught in the jaws of a sperm whale, he has to fight for survival, as well as realising the issues with his and Mitt’s relationship. This isn’t necessarily a terrible story to tell, and can even be quite compelling at times, though you could swap out the motivations and setting and you’d have 127 Hours, almost to a T. Whalefall has very little deviation and hardly seems intent on any.
The first ten minutes, after Jay finally steps in the water, were a terrible time for me, with thalassophobia - the fear of deep bodies of water - though that felt quite intentional, and I actually hold it as a point in Whalefall’s favour. The scenery is full of vast nothingness, with very little sound aside from the mysterious wailing of various ocean life, no indication of their size or danger until they come too close.
However, who this is really made for - at least once Jay enters the whale - is those with claustrophobia. Throughout, you’ll constantly feel as if the walls could close in at any moment, often because they do. Even if you aren’t claustrophobic, I’m sure this will give you some amount of that same feeling while you watch. Jay is never safe from the walls of this whale’s stomach closing entirely and breaking many of his bones, and the movie makes a point to remind you of that fact.
After Jay enters this whale - about ten minutes after, in fact - a big question pops into your mind, either out of interest or slight worry for your next hour: what happens now? All we really see from the trailers is Jay getting stuck in this whale, so where do we go from here? Surely there’s not an hour’s worth of enjoyment to get from a man attempting to escape a whale’s stomach, so there has to be more to this story. The answer to this ends up being no; it turns out there isn’t really that much to gauge from this concept.
While we do get flashbacks to events in Jay’s life, involving his father - which prove to be thematically relevant at one point or another - those fleeting moments aren’t really enough to go off, leaving the next hour to simply be a trudge to sit through. I believe this may be one of the few movies that I’d say you can very easily go to the toilet throughout; it’s unlikely you’ll miss much.
One thing I really admired was the lack of a B-plot. Many movies like this, at least the lacklustre ones, will occasionally cut back to civilisation, following the family or somebody close to the protagonist as they put together a rescue mission, ultimately ruining much of the tension and isolation that is built up throughout the main story.
What comes to mind is 2025’s Dangerous Animals - for an oceanbound example. For all its flaws - and believe me, there are plenty - many of the scenes on the boat do feel quite terrifying, simply due to the emptiness that is around our main characters. It seems there’s absolutely no way that they could possibly survive this situation; they must be hours away from any kind of civilisation at all. We’re fed all this tension, then we cut back to dry land, in which a few side characters are putting together a rescue mission, and suddenly you feel much less alone and like these characters definitely could survive - possibly with ease.
Luckily, Whalefall never falls into this trap, focusing entirely on Jay and his relationship with his father, making the story as a whole feel that much more isolating. We have absolutely no idea what’s going on outside of this whale’s body. Does Jay’s family even know he’s gone? Now, you get a sinking feeling that Jay has no way out of this situation, and that feeling just keeps getting deeper and deeper, not letting up until the very end.
This movie’s third act is where it gets quite divisive, at least in my head. On the one hand, this leaves absolutely everything on the table; there’s no subtlety in any sense of the word. However, on the other hand, I kind of liked that about it, and I don’t fully understand why. Yes, it's quite heavy-handed and could - arguably should - have gone in quite a different direction, but while watching I really didn’t feel as if I was being treated like a child.
There are moments here that feel quite nonsensical, like the whale somewhat becoming Jay’s dad, though. Using that as an example, it felt as if the writers forgot it was meant to be Jay’s delusion halfway through, and leaned too far into this whale literally becoming his father - like with him going as far to the surface as possible. However, I can’t fully say this isn’t a natural direction for this story, even if I also wouldn’t confidently back the contrary.
While Whalefall ended up quite a confusing movie, in its overall quality, one thing is for certain: it's very long. Much of the 127 Hours-like story drags far further than it should, causing you to check your watch every ten minutes - but you’ll think it’s been 25. Even though it contained a few interesting messages, they simply aren’t enough to hold Whalefall in any higher regard than a simple shrug and an “it's okay” when somebody asks for a recommendation.