Movie review: ‘Whalefall’ is at its best when the monster is grief

A young man gets swallowed whole by a 70-foot sperm whale. He has a dive computer ticking down the minutes, roughly an hour of oxygen, a pocket knife, and a wetsuit that is not exactly designed for prolonged contact with gastric acid. That is the elevator pitch for “Whalefall,” a premise so gloriously ridiculous it could have been played as midnight-movie schlock.

Brian Duffield wisely doesn’t.

Instead, he plays the whole rotten nightmare straight. Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) is not some wisecracking action hero waiting to MacGyver his way out of the beast. He’s a scared, damaged kid, and the movie makes us feel every miserable second of his predicament. The whale’s innards are wet, cramped, pulsating, and horribly alive. The sound design does much of the dirty work: squelching flesh, groaning blubber, the hiss of digestive acid, the muffled violence of an enormous animal moving through an ocean that could swallow Jay without noticing.

Abrams is terrific precisely because he doesn’t make survival look cool. He thrashes. He panics. He gasps. He makes bad decisions. His body becomes the movie’s special effect — bruised, exhausted, and progressively more desperate. Duffield understands that terror works better when the victim looks like a victim.

Then the movie cuts away.

And cuts away again.

And again.

Jay’s ordeal is repeatedly interrupted by flashbacks to his childhood and his poisonous relationship with his father, Mitt, played by Josh Brolin with the weathered authority of a man who appears to have been carved out of driftwood and bad decisions. Mitt is abusive, domineering, and obsessed with toughness. Jay, meanwhile, has spent much of his life trying to escape the man’s shadow.

These scenes can be maddening. Just when “Whalefall” has you locked inside that biological hellhole, the movie yanks you back to family drama. The oxygen clock is ticking, the whale is churning, Jay is bleeding, and suddenly we’re back in his troubled past, watching another chapter of Dad’s terrible parenting.

For stretches, it feels like two different movies fighting over the same 106 minutes. 

But here’s the inconvenient thing: the flashbacks are necessary.

Watching a terrified kid hack through cartilage with a pocket knife is visceral. It is also hollow if we don’t care whether he gets out. The ocean gives Duffield an enormous physical space in which to stage Jay’s crisis, but emotionally, the movie is about something much smaller. Grief. Fear. The miserable inheritance of a parent who taught you how to survive while making you hate the lessons.

That is where “Whalefall” starts to work on something deeper than its wonderfully stupid premise.

The ocean is indifferent. So is the whale. Neither cares whether Jay reconciles with his father, forgives him, resents him, or remembers him accurately. Nature simply keeps moving. Jay has to decide what, if anything, he is going to carry out of that darkness.

As massive as the ocean and the leviathan within it are, “Whalefall” is at its absolute best when it gets the smallest thing right: home.

Not the house. Not the family portrait. Home as the place inside yourself that remains after you’ve spent years trying to get away from somebody else.

That idea gives the film’s survival mechanics their real weight. The whale isn’t merely a monster. It is a tomb, a prison, a memory chamber. Jay enters it trying to retrieve his dead father and spends the rest of the movie figuring out whether he can leave the old man behind.

“Whalefall” is occasionally too earnest, too repetitive, and far too fond of stopping its own pulse to explain its feelings. But when Duffield lets the physical horror and emotional horror collide, the film becomes something stranger and better than its absurd premise suggests.

The whale is the hook. Grief is the trap.