Whalefall Review: Austin Abrams Anchors a Visceral but Uneven Adaptation

Whalefall is most persuasive when it traps Jay Gardiner alone in the body of a whale. Austin Abrams makes the ordeal vivid through strained breaths, desperate movement and screams delivered around the mouthpiece keeping him alive. The film’s intimate, practical underwater set gives those scenes a raw physical force. Yet the adaptation struggles to give Jay’s grief comparable depth, and its late reliance on computer-generated imagery drains some of the emotion it has worked to build.

Directed by Brian Duffield, whose credits include No One Will Save You, the 116-minute film follows Jay as he searches for his father, Mitt, played by Josh Brolin. Jay has only an hour’s worth of air for the dive, along with years of insecurity shaped by his father’s disapproval. Then a whale swallows him, turning his search into a fight to escape. The opening offers a brief glimpse of Mitt in sunlight, coughing aboard a boat. Much of what follows unfolds in dim blue light inside the whale, where Jay faces a physical crisis alongside the weight of their relationship.

A strong central performance

Abrams carries long stretches with little company on screen, an assignment that demands more than suspense. As Jay is shoved around inside the whale, he has to keep hold of his respirator, guard his head and avoid the other prey in the animal’s stomach. He is battered, cut, stung and partly dissolved by stomach acid. The effects team makes the space feel wet, sticky and dangerous, while Duffield gives Abrams room to show the strain of surviving it.

The whale’s interior was built as a practical set, with Abrams in a wetsuit and glowsticks illuminating life-sized stomach chambers. That choice pays off. The physical space gives his performance something tangible to push against, and the cramped setting makes each struggle feel immediate. Abrams has earned a reputation online as a “scream king”; here, his ability to cry out convincingly while holding onto the mouthpiece is a striking part of the film’s craft. His work is the clearest reason to stay with Whalefall.

The adaptation also finds flashes of Daniel Kraus’s writing in these scenes. The reviewer found passages from the book coming to mind as Jay endured the whale’s violent interior. That connection gives the sequence a texture the rest of the film doesn’t sustain.

When the book’s inner life moves to the screen

Whalefall combines survival thriller, family drama and an account of a son trying to understand his father. The film draws on the novel’s flashbacks and internal narration to provide that family history, but the reviewer finds those tools less effective on screen. A book can leave a reader alone with a character’s thoughts, allowing the reader to form an image of that inner life. Film has to find another way to convey what a character doesn’t say. Here, the voiceover and flashbacks make the emotional meaning unusually explicit.

Mitt’s role is narrowed by that approach. The flashbacks leave little room to interpret Jay’s feelings, while Brolin’s character appears largely as an angry father, shouting at his son or railing about tourists and capitalism. His voice returns inside the whale to urge Jay onward with phrases such as “the ocean always provides” and “breathe sleepy.” The film makes clear that Mitt still matters to Jay; it gives the relationship less space to become complicated.

The flashbacks’ modified anamorphic look is another choice the reviewer finds distracting. By making them visually distinct, the film signals what the audience can already understand from the scene. The effect feels unnecessary and breaks the tension that Abrams’s scenes have earned.

Grief beneath the survival story

The story’s deeper conflict concerns what a person leaves behind and who gets to decide what happens after death. Mitt wants to die at sea, leaving his body to nature. Jay wants to recover his father and be useful to his family. The source material’s image of a whale’s body nourishing an ecosystem gives that tension a physical counterpart: death can become part of something living. The reviewer sees this as the film’s richest idea, but argues that the movie doesn’t adequately explore it.

Grief also resists tidy circumstances. Jay attempts his dive in choppy water, from a beach closed because orcas are nearby. The setting reflects the difficulty of finding an ideal moment to confront loss: when someone dies, grief becomes part of what remains. That thought gives the film a moving premise, but its scenes don’t fully develop the competing wishes at the center of Jay’s search.

Near the end, the film shifts from its practical whale interior to heavier computer-generated imagery in exterior shots. For the reviewer, that change weakens the emotional crest of the story. The images that once made Jay’s ordeal feel immediate now seem less convincing, undercutting the sadness and profound grief that Kraus’s book had inspired.

The reviewer’s verdict is measured: Whalefall has memorable set pieces and a compelling performance from Abrams, but the film doesn’t make its central family story resonate as fully as it could. The adaptation, in this view, should stand on its own rather than depend on the novel to supply context or restore the emotions that faded on screen. Readers who found something to like in the movie may find the book offers a fuller experience of Jay’s story.

Abrams’s work makes the film worth seeking out for readers drawn to tense, contained survival stories. For the reviewer, though, the practical whale set and strong central performance can’t fully compensate for the missing depth. The book remains the more complete account of a son, a father and the grief between them.

The film features Abrams, whose credits include Resident Evil and Weapons, and Brolin, whose credits include The Dog Stars and Weapons.