Elevated horror I can do. (Indeed, I quite like it.) Elevated creature features? This I might not need. True, you could describe 1954’s Godzilla this way, considering it is both fantastically fun and a genuine meditation on nuclear devastation. Whalefall, however—in which a scuba diver gets gobbled up by a sperm whale—gives just as much time to monstrous thrills as it does to a family-trauma backstory. Call me simple, but a movie in which a man clings for dear life to the tongue of a whale should be a lot more fun. As Jay, the diver, Austin Abrams (Resident Evil, Weapons) does what he can beneath all sorts of breathing apparatus to lighten the tone (even as his screams and bulging eyes also convey the proper amount of terror). In fact, there’s an extended sequence in which a bioluminescent jellyfish is to Jay what Wilson the volleyball was to Tom Hanks in Cast Away. Yet the spine of the film is Jay’s attempts to process the recent death of his late father (Josh Brolin), with whom he had a difficult relationship. And so in between his squishy struggles to escape the whale, there are copious flashbacks to his confrontations with his father, all stridently staged and poorly performed. (Just when I thought Brolin could do no wrong.) Whalefall doesn’t entirely disappoint as a creature feature, however. The early scenes of Jay underwater have a numinous grandeur, especially as he hovers at the edge of a cliff, staring into the abyss below. When the whale emerges (accompanied by thundering sound design), the biblical story that came to mind was not so much that of Jonah—the prophet who ended up in the belly of the whale—but Job, the stunned recipient of a magnificent monologue testifying to God’s creative splendor. Whalefall, unfortunately, spends too much time exploring depths that are pedestrianly psychological.
(10/14/2026)
