Whalefall: Austin Abrams gives it his all in a passable film about a man swallowed by a whale

Daniel Krauss’s 2023 best-seller Whalefall is preposterously entertaining and moving almost in spite of its shamelessly high-concept horror scenario. It’s also the sort of novel that obliges you to imagine a potential film adaptation as you’re reading it. As if some enterprising Hollywood producer wasn’t going to snap up the rights to a (literally) breathless first-person survival narrative centred on an unlucky diver ingested unintentionally by a sixty-ton sperm whale. It’s a situation he’s strangely prepared to face in his capacity as the (grieving) son of a legendary diver who routinely spewed out facts about regulators (don’t lose them) scuba tanks (they blow up) and whale biology (lots of nooks and crannies in those massive bodies) before taking a terminal cancer diagnosis into his own hands.   

Krauss, who collaborated with Guillermo Del Toro on The Shape of Water (2017) and authored a fine non-fiction appreciation of Night of the Living Dead (and won a surprising Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his virtuoso World War I-era thriller Angel Down), is an emotional storyteller with a distinctly cinematic voice: he writes in shifting aspect ratios, with shape and scale. “It must be the strongest thing that ever lived,” thinks the book’s narrator Jay when he first spies the creature whose belly will come to serve in time as a private spiritual crucible. “It holds the pose, a comma in a sentence so large only gods can read it.” Good luck to the director – and special effects team – that has to live up to that description.  

Suffice it to say that in terms of degree of difficulty, Jay’s adventures represent a Leviathan-sized challenge for potential director: a dual exercise in tactile viscera and lofty metaphysics; spectacle melded to psychodrama; a hero sloshing helplessly around in the belly of the beast while also climbing the walls of his own mind. Interiority is something that literary fiction is very good at but blockbuster-sized filmmaking tends to, well, swallow up; that Krauss himself co-wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Whalefall with director Brian Duffield doesn’t mitigate the feeling of a work lodged intractably between mediums, faithful in ways that honour the source material while betraying some larger and insoluble folly.   

The best thing that Whalefall has going for it is its leading man. Fresh off dodging zombies in his pal Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil (2026), Austin Abrams doubles down on his emerging persona as a sentient blood bag: he’s at his best when getting punctured and pummelled, and holds steady through a series of injuries including bites, burns, and a busted eardrum. On the page, Jay (“J” for Job or for Jonah, take your pick) is endlessly loquacious but also a bit of a cipher, caught up in the mechanics of life-or-death problem solving; Abrams, who’s got soulful looks and goofball instincts, renders the character’s anxieties vivid and specific, processing his predicament as a fugue state of slapstick claustrophobia. (Most actors are conceiving talking to themselves: here, as in Resident Evil, Abrams proves a great one-way conversationalist). Meanwhile, as Jay’s late father Mitt – a sea-salty patriarch glimpsed in intermittent flashbacks synced to our hero’s fear-and-pain induced losses of consciousness – Josh Brolin gives passable Ahab and chews scenery like Fishermans’ Friend lozenges. 

It’s hopefully not too much of a spoiler to reveal that Mitt becomes an active – if ephemeral – presence in Whalefall, speaking to his son in the present tense through the cavernous passages of the whale’s body, as fusing his consciousnesses therein. The way one feels about the slightly Pixar-ish  premise of inter-species communion (cue Ellen Degeneres yodelling in Finding Nemo (2003)) will probably determine whether the CGI-filled thrill ride engineered around it comes off as vital or superfluous. It could go either way, even as Brian Duffield’s smooth, competent action direction – improved from his alien-home-invasion breakthrough No One will Save You (2023) – holds the line. Sometimes it does more than that: a late set piece involving a pod of marauding orcas tearing Jay’s blubbery stronghold vibrates on a wavelength of spectral, science-fictional beauty to rival anything in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012). Mostly, though, Whalefall has a stolid, workmanlike quality that permits more lapses in taste and tone than one might like, including a corny coda that undermines the book’s startling, exhilarating hard stop – a small but unfortunate alteration that hints at larger compromises.  

► Whalefall is in UK cinemas now.