The Brian Duffield-directed survival thriller, in which Abrams plays a diver swallowed by a sperm whale, opens October 16 after premiering in London.
The first wave of reactions to Whalefall landed on social media Monday night after the film's London premiere, and the verdict is messy in the best possible way. Some critics are calling it one of the year's most intense theatrical experiences. Others think it collapses under its own sentimentality by the final act. Nobody, though, is arguing with Austin Abrams.
Directed by Brian Duffield and adapted from Daniel Kraus's 2023 novel, Whalefall follows Jay Gardiner (Abrams), who goes diving off California's Central Coast searching for the remains of his late father, played by Josh Brolin. Things go sideways fast. A sperm whale swallows him whole, and with roughly an hour of oxygen left, Jay has to lean on the hard lessons his dad drilled into him just to survive the night.
The praise clusters around two things: the claustrophobia and the sound design. One critic described getting swallowed by the film's "majestic gullet," writing their knees didn't stop shaking through the runtime. Another called it a messed-up version of Inner Space, all guts and slime, buoyed by an emotional core strong enough to make you tear up despite the gross-out premise. Several reactions flagged the CGI work on the whale itself as genuinely impressive, and more than one critic recommended catching it in a premium large-format screen for the sound mix alone.
The skepticism is just as pointed. More than one reviewer called the father-son trauma plot boilerplate, with one review going so far as to say the ending is absurd. Another compared the film unfavorably to Ad Astra, arguing the emotional beats never quite earn their insane survival-thriller premise. At least one take was outright brutal, calling Whalefall patience-testing and inexplicably boring, with action sequences too dimly lit to track.
What almost nobody disputes is Abrams. Critics kept circling back to how much fear he conveys despite acting through diving goggles and a breathing apparatus for most of the film, which isn't exactly a face actors usually get to work with. One reaction joked that his back must be aching this month, pointing out he's now carried two thrillers in a row solo, following Resident Evil earlier this year. Brolin gets credit too, mostly for grounding the father-son flashbacks that several critics otherwise found saccharine.
Whalefall is distributed by 20th Century in the UK and opens in theaters on October 16. Full reviews are expected to roll out closer to release, and given how split the early word is, this one looks headed for a genuine critical argument rather than a consensus. Whether audiences side with the spectacle or the skeptics will become clear soon enough.
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