Variety's review of the Daniel Kraus adaptation calls the Brian Duffield thriller unintentionally funny, with Josh Brolin playing Abrams's abusive father in flashback.
Austin Abrams spends most of his new movie inside the digestive tract of a sperm whale, and according to Variety's review, that premise plays a lot funnier than it was ever meant to.
"Whalefall" is adapted from Daniel Kraus's 2023 bestseller of the same name, a book that landed to real acclaim. The film version, directed by Brian Duffield, follows Jay Gardiner (Abrams), a scuba diver who goes searching off Monastery Beach near Monterey for the body of his father, a seaman who died by suicide after a mesothelioma diagnosis ended his diving career. The dive goes sideways fast. Jay gets wrapped up in a giant squid's tentacles, and a hunting sperm whale swallows them both whole.
From there, the movie is basically a one-man survival story staged entirely in whale anatomy. Variety's critic describes two distinct chambers inside the beast, a phosphorescent blue holding area and a hellish red stomach cavity where the acid starts working, and most of the plot is Jay trying to avoid sliding from one into the other. At one point he lights his way using a jellyfish the whale had already eaten for dinner.
The review is not kind. It calls the film "a fearless tale of human perseverance and mammalian stomach lining," which is a compliment in form only, and suggests the thing should have been titled something closer to a Weir knockoff about fish guts. The verdict on Abrams is rougher still, with the critic writing that he comes off wimpy and unconvincing, mostly reduced to grunting around an oxygen mouthpiece rather than carrying a performance.
The review notes this is the second film in a month where Abrams has had to physically escape something with tentacles, the first being Zach Cregger's "Resident Evil," and the comparison does "Whalefall" no favours. Josh Brolin plays the dead father, Mitt, in flashback, and the review likens his performance to a boozier, more psychotic Quint from "Jaws" — a brusque, tattooed, macho-dad archetype meant to explain why Jay is damaged enough to end up here in the first place.
Structurally, the film keeps cutting between the present-tense ordeal and scenes of Jay and Mitt's relationship falling apart over the years, with the twist, such as it is, being that the very toughness Mitt beat into his son turns out to be what gets him free. Variety's critic isn't buying the emotional payoff, calling the whole arc thin cover for a thriller that runs out of ideas once the gross-out visuals wear off.
There's a real ecological hook buried in the title. A whalefall is the scientific term for what happens when a dead whale sinks to the sea floor and feeds an entire ecosystem for years. Variety's parting shot is that the movie never earns that metaphor, calling it a carcass of a thriller that stays exactly that. No US release date or distributor details were included in the review itself, so how wide an audience actually gets swallowed by this one remains to be seen.
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