★★½ (2½ out of 4)
It depends on the effects, right? That’s why you will or won’t buy a ticket to “Whalefall,” starring “Resident Evil” bad boy Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner, a scuba diver who gets gulped down by a sperm whale while searching for the remains of his father Mitt (Josh Brolin). And get this—he only has an hour before his oxygen runs out. Are you in?
The special effects, I rush to point out, are pretty damn impressive even if you can’t totally stomach the icky sights you’re seeing. Look, Monstro the giant whale guzzled down the puppet boy in “Pinocchio” and we all bought it, even when the kid discovered his dad, Geppetto, in the fish’s belly. But “Pinocchio” is a 1940 Disney animated classic. Animation always makes it easier to buy into blather.
“Whalefall,” directed by Brian Duffield (“No One Will Save You”) from the 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus, is obsessed with looking real, gross real and by that I mean not cartoonish. And face it, folks, AI slop makes it impossible to accept that anything these days is real. But you believe it here, at least for the first rounds of Jay’s aquatic odyssey. That’s because a few graphic and gag-inducing effects that stretch the PG-13 rating to the limit make it easier to suspend disbelief, even when the kid finds he’s sharing space inside the whale’s tummy with a giant, fighting squid.
Duffield makes it fun to be fooled, which is half the battle. It helps that Jay is played by Abrams, the deadpan livewire best known as Ron Anderson in “The Walking Dead,” Ethan Daly in “Euphoria,” the junkie car thief in “Weapons” and the dude who stole “Wolfs” from right under the star egos of Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Between these and “Resident Evil,” Abrams is on fire.
In “Whalefall,” his Jay is a troubled youth who leaves college in Iowa to explore the ocean floor off the California coast of his childhood home. He’s searching for the corpse of his drowned father (Brolin is too good for this nonsense but totally committed), who died a year ago. He wants to bring any scraps, even bone remnants, to his mother, Zara (Oscar nominee Elisabeth Shue), and sisters Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd), who never thereafter are heard from again—a typical fate I guess for women in male and whale bonding movies.
It’s fine as long as this aquatic thriller keeps us on spin cycle in the belly of the beast. The rest is bilge water.
Jay has serious daddy issues with the bullying Mitt, who added weights to his body and took a long dive to oblivion. Apparently, that’s what real men do after a terminal cancer diagnosis.
A seasoned diver, Mitt taught his son about the ocean through harsh lessons that leave Jay feeling belittled. His father’s death leaves that conflict painfully unfinished. But here’s the cheap irony: Mitt’s diving lessons—and his remembered instructions—keep Jay alive to confront the king-sized emotional knots that get untangled in “Whalefall.”
Abrams and Brolin, confined to flashbacks, are terrific together, despite the script’s attempts to weigh them down with clichés. Never mind. It’s the effects that matter. A practical 12-foot-long, 18-foot-wide whale was constructed for the shoot that lasted 62 days. And it looks suitably repulsive, resembling the slime upchucked by the slithery monster in “Alien.” Jay’s muffled screams behind his scuba mask say it all. If you’re wondering what gallons of whale digestive fluid can do to a human body, “Whalefall” is the movie for you. It’s a cinematic gag reflex made flesh.
Still, there’s always something a little off about “Whalefall.” The title namechecks the thing that happens when a dead whale carcass sinks to the ocean floor, where its flesh nourishes other life forms so that, yes, life goes on. We hear Brolin’s voice intoning a mystical message so cornball that you might want to abandon ship yourself. I think that Brolin and the whale are meant to be dueting as the voice of God, but I may be hallucinating. As long as the filmmakers stay focused on putting us on spin cycle inside the belly of the beast, “Whalefall” gets the job done. The rest is bilge water.