It’s Whalefall Fall
Released on Friday, Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin star in Whalefall, a new film from 20th Century Studios based on the book of the same name. Directed by Brian Duffield (Spontaneous, No One Will Save You), Whalefall tells the story of Jay Gardiner (Abrams), a young man in search of his late father Mitt’s remains (Brolin) in the ocean on his first dive over a year since his passing.
I initially had no plans to see the film as the trailers hadn’t grabbed me—I will maintain that while I enjoyed the movie in the end, the marketing probably failed it a bit. Each trailer I saw prior to Whalefall‘s release made it seem like a spatial horror with a premise that starts and ends with the protagonist in a whale’s stomach. However, the story of Jay and his father’s lifelong troubled dynamic is what the initial trailers I saw hid away well enough if you hadn’t read or even heard of the book. I was a part of the latter crowd, and it wasn’t until a friend who’d read the book made the push that we decided to take a night out for the film. And this friend was right about Project Hail Mary, too, so I trusted their judgment.
It’s been a great two months for people who love Austin Abrams on screen. I’d argue the emotion put into this role rivals that which I saw from him in Resident Evil (no shade to Zach Cregger’s new film, I wanna go on record that I LOVE Bryan Hodukavich). Jay’s character is introduced as tragic, clearly having the most complicated relationship in his family between himself and his father among his mother and siblings. He doesn’t try to make this anyone else’s problem, but his emotional avoidance itself concerns everyone around him. This sets a dangerous feeling as he makes his way towards the coast, diving one last time to try and find his father’s remains, alone.
Something I will say regarding this part of Whalefall is that it moves very fast. The movie isn’t very long, and they waste no time from the moment Jay dives into the water to the second he’s swallowed by a whale. It almost felt like the narrative was itself conscious of where this was ending up too. I think some of my problems with the film’s later pacing within the whale is how the environment kind of blends together sometimes. There’s only so many parts of the whale Jay travels between, and sometimes he needs to backtrack a bit. What this reminds me of is Iron Lung, which feels kind of like a similar situation in that regard and just the fact the protagonist is trapped in this vessel with nothing to do but hope to ascend or descend into the depths.
The atmosphere of the film inside the whale is, in a word, disgusting. In multiple words, it’s disgusting and uncomfortable and hard to watch. Luckily, that was the intention, so I’m praising the film when I say that. It’s not what the inside of a whale is really like, of course, so I have to say the production and set design in regards to those faux innards are something I really admire. There are so many textures I have no clue how they would have recreated, and the immersion never broke once. I felt myself wincing at certain points, a feeling I haven’t had much with 2026 releases. Unlike what I thought the trailers were leading me to believe, this narrative really did make me feel different, and I love different in a thriller. I couldn’t once predict how things were going to go next, and I definitely couldn’t see coming just how many methods Jay had up his sleeve from Mitt’s teachings.
Whalefall is now in theaters nationwide.