Directed By Brian Duffield

Starring – Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue

The Plot – Follows a grieving scuba diver (Abrams) who, while looking for his father’s (Brolin) remains, is swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale and has just one hour to get out before his oxygen runs out.

Rated PG-13 for peril, violent content, bloody images, some strong adult language, and thematic content.

Whalefall | Official Trailer | In Theaters October 16

POSITIVES

This is yet another intimately immersive example of film’s limitless reach among uncharted territory, both in the engrossingly intense spectacle of its stomach-scrawling set piece, but also the stirring sentimentality of one man’s imperfect relationship with his recently deceased father, providing a roller-coaster of flooded emotions so earnestly enacted that it makes Whalefall such a gut-wrenching experience at every turn. On the former, while Duffield’s dizzying direction goes a long way towards coherently fleshing out the tension and anxieties of Jay’s race against the clock, with maintained emphasis on the decreasing oxygen allowance from an oxygen regulator, that keeps his protagonist alive under such dire circumstances, legitimacy is made artistically attainable from the production’s constructing of an 18-foot animatronic whale head with an underwater moving tongue, as well as a heavy duty motion base and rig designed to continuously spin like a washing machine, in order to effectively emulate the motions of a whale, and while I’ve always been a firm advocate towards the use of practicality in effects work, the dimensionality of the detail and the tightly condensed limited movability of the character effortlessly breed urgency and vulnerability in the unlikely predicament of our grieving protagonist, adding a physically demanding conflict that simultaneously mirrors the regret and resentment of what’s playing out psychologically with his own unfinished business with a verbally abusive parent, in ways that continuously crash like the very waves that surround Jay’s submersion. For that very emotional conflict, the script co-written by Duffield and the book’s author, Daniel Kraus, concisely understand that 101 minutes of screentime inside of a whale’s stomach will get old quickly if not given something substantially stimulating to fall back on, and between some smoothly implemented flashbacks of Jay’s tumultuously torturous time spent alongside his father, as well as his own coming to terms with the legend of his elder being an environmentally beloved figure among his family and community, the script juggles some pretty hefty themes and introspective observations without any of the low-hanging answers that are typically spelled out with on-the-nose exposition, in turn enacting a much smarter and cerebrally elevating experience than I was expecting from a single stage chamber piece, without any of the articulated dramatic depth meandering melodramatically to take away from the inspirational aspect of a man who physically and mentally seeks to evade his captivity. Likewise, Duffield’s aforementioned directional impulses lean heavily on the integrity of the film’s viscerally aggressive techniques from Aaron Morton’s suffocating cinematography, featuring the kind of invasive framing and atmospheric tweaking that conveys Jay as being a helplessly overwhelmed victim through an environment that is actively assaulting him at all times. This is especially the case whenever the imagery zeroes in jarringly close to Jay’s facial registries, where so much about Morton’s eagerly exhilarated framing artistically amplifies all of the pain, fear, and frenzy of Jay’s exasperated vulnerability, but even during the film’s more subdued moments involving Jay’s reflective regrets, there’s a conscientious lingering over the heaviness of his realizations that allows the revelations to land so heavily and profoundly to how he’s advantageously interpreting them, allowing the audience to sit a lot longer than expected with the character’s grief, regardless of how uncomfortably it sedates the otherwise smoothly seamless pacing of its three act structure, in turn employing a faithfully nagging kind of persistence that refuses to stray far from where the impacts land so influentially the loudest, paving a more than formidably memorable path for some of the year’s best sound mixing to articulate depth to the instability of the environment. To say that there are otherworldly layers to what the soundscapes are accomplishing here is simply putting it lightly, as every amplified bodily organ churns individually towards an all-enveloping chaotic chorus that never allows us to lose sight of our character’s conflictual captivity, allowing the terrifying realism of its impeccable detail to maximize thunderously towards the aforementioned claustrophobic tension feeling inescapable. While the immensity of the whale is never a question with the way its movements and cries echoingly resonate to define its power dynamic with Jay, the most impressive aspects easily pertain to its stomach-acid squelching, rhythmically riveting pressure waves, and Jay’s wheezing oxygen regulator, driving the suspense of every gripping sequence relentlessly, offering an impressive kind of craftsmanship that silences any semblance of preconceived doubt about the environmental realities of what we’re interpreting in real time. As great as everything previously heralded is, it would mean less without some talented performances to tap into the abundance of humanity that resides within this project, particularly Austin Abrams, who is not only giving the most physically demanding performance of his brief-but-impactful career, but also displays a massive range of emotions that utilize the dramatic depth of an actor who has been criminally underutilized before this year. What’s truly special about Abrams techniques here is that he’s contextualizing a lot of internalized feelings with both his eyes and the physical grunts of his mouth being occupied by a scuba mouthpiece, and though the dialogue is a bit unavoidably choppy and incoherent in this regard, Abrams rises to the surface with a humbling portrayal that emotionally illustrates the isolated despair of his extraordinary circumstances, proving his talents to pertain to so much more than just his sharp knack for physical comedy, as seen in last month’s Resident Evil. Abrams is complimented by a heavy supporting turn from Josh Brolin, whose balance between stern disciplinarian of toxic masculinity and the vulnerability of a reeling Mesothelioma tragically encompasses a father who is watching a life and relationship with his son slip through his fingers, where Brolin imbeds some much-required heart and screen presence to those candid moments away from claustrophobia, in turn combining with Abrams to elicit a deeply troubled and underlined loving father-son dynamic that emotionally sneaks up on those of us with familiarities to complex parental relationships.

NEGATIVES

Though most of what Duffield and his production accomplish here productively overcomes its situational shortcomings, there are some unfortunately glaring aspects that directly intrude upon the film’s integrity, such as a grand suspension of disbelief that begins as quickly as the conceptual set-up of a son attempting to find the submerged remains of a father who died one year previous. I’m not necessarily sure what Jay was expecting to find considering the decomposing of a body in water happens as quickly as the first few hours, but even if you overlook this troubling tidbit for the sequencing of events that follow, you must eventually come to terms with the fact that Jay not only survived the crushing pressure of the deep ocean levels, the sharpness and size of the whale’s teeth, and the immediate suffocation of the initial swallow, all while keeping his scuba gear intact and fully functional, and while this film prides itself on the authenticity of an environment that is articulated with impeccable detail in sight and sound, it becomes a bit compromised by lackadaisically enacted schematics that don’t abide by the same laws of logic, requiring quite a few leaps over disbelief, in order to remain at eye level with a film with an already preposterous plot. In addition to this, while the script is wise enough to maintain Jay’s breathing apparatus almost at all times, its occupancy over his mouth leaves some of the dialogue unavoidably difficult to decipher, leaving some of his introspectively unloaded and spontaneous actions unrealized by some marble mouthed deliveries that are doing no favors to maintaining an audience. On one hand, the need for overhead narration could’ve gone a long way in garnering definition to such clarity, especially with how strange it is that Jay speaks audibly to the movie unable to acknowledge an audience, but even without alleviations, an at-home sit might squander the spectacle of what’s involved, but does open up the ability to utilize closed captions to correspond with dialogue, something that could’ve helped me out during some of the slowest spots throughout the film. Lastly, while the script typically fires on all cylinders, creatively, one major decision during the film’s ending left a bitter taste to my engagement, specifically the contents of Jay’s note from his father never being read but never revealed to the audience. While I understand that the intention is to prioritize Jay’s confrontational closure over the details encompassed, I feel like some contextual clarity could’ve gone a long way towards enabling the emotionality that the sequence leans so heavily on, in turn giving us a greater significance and understanding of his father’s abrasive treatment of his son.

OVERALL
Whalefall is a viscerally intense kind of survival thriller that contextualizes claustrophobic terror with stunning visuals, stimulatingly sleek camera work, and impeccable soundscapes of the grandest immersive quality, all the while tantalizing audiences with squirming submersion that gets darker and deeper with each passing minute. While the script requires a bit too much suspension of disbelief, and the ending doesn’t fully realize the extent of its enacted emotionality, the film is steadied by dizzying direction from Brian Duffield, and a resiliently restless and dominating turn from Austin Abrams appraising authenticity to its whale of a tale, providing enough commanding thrills to capitalize on the horror hounds of late October.

My Grade: 7.6 or B