PG-13 | 1h 46m | Action, Drama, Thriller | 2026
If you’ve got thalassophobia (an intense and irrational fear of deep or open bodies of water) and claustrophobia (a fear of enclosed or confined spaces), the survival drama “Whalefall”—about swimming around in the open ocean and getting swallowed by a whale—might raise your blood pressure.
While I was mildly spooked by the gloomy ocean shots, I was more bored and irked by a young man stuck in a sperm whale’s esophagus and hollering “Arrgh!” “Ughh!” “Errmff!” and “Gahh!” through his scuba regulator for over an hour.
Still, I didn’t feel, as is so often the case these days, that I lost time that I can never get back.
Father and Son
Salty Mitt Gardiner (Josh Brolin) is a grizzled, seafaring-tattoo-emblazoned sea dog. He isn’t the current Navy SEAL type; he’s more of a small fishing vessel captain, old-man-of-the-sea kinda guy.
“The ocean always provides,” Mitt sagely declares to his sensitive, easily cowed son Jay (Austin Abrams), a young man who has spent his life in the shadow of his alcoholic and verbally abusive dad’s demands and challenges. Mitt shouts, “You’re not ready!” in an attempt to bully his son into becoming a man.
The Jonah-and-the-whale-like “Whalefall” begins with Mitt having the type of generic, intense coughing fit that screams “advanced-stage horrendous illness.”
Mitt is on a fishing trip, on his boat in the middle of the ocean, alongside his friend Hewey (John Oritz). He dons a weight belt, but no other scuba gear—suicide by weight belt. Mitt left letters for his three kids in a cooler stored in Jay’s childhood bedroom.
A few years later, after no body was ever recovered, Jay decides to search the ocean floor for his father’s remains. He wades into the surf at Monterey’s Monastery Beach, ignoring signage declaring that at least 30 people have died, as well as the local police who are in the process of shutting down beach access due to extreme weather. He also ignores the fact that he forgot his gloves.
Jonah 1:17 Swallowing
The scene that soon turns Jay into Jonah in the belly of the whale is the movie’s best. After a foray through the gloomy Pacific’s kelp beds, Jay leans off a rock shelf that hovers over the black abyss that is the nightmare of all thalassophobes. He thinks he sees his dad’s skull 20 feet down on a ledge; he ventures down a bit, but alas, ’tis only a sea sponge.
But, heralded by massive sonar clicks, a bus-sized Architeuthis dux (giant squid) rockets up out of the looming deep. These squid, with their dinner-plate-sized eyes, are nature’s true monsters. Though they put up a decent fight, they are basically calamari snacks for the mighty sperm whale. And one such huge beast is in hot pursuit. Jay ends up in the direct path of the hunting whale. This footage is not noticeably CGI, and it is pretty impressive.
“Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.”
As Jay comes to inside the stomach of the giant mammal (somehow managing to keep all of his scuba gear intact throughout), he realizes he needs to exit the whale before being digested. It’s unlikely that the Lord will speak unto the fish, and it shall vomit out Jay upon the dry land.
In the Belly of the Beast
Curiously, the 40-foot-long Architeuthis squid that accompanied Jay into the whale’s gullet shrinks dramatically. Now it’s a 10-foot Humbolt squid, which is still a formidable predator, fully capable of ripping the limbs off humans. It also thinks Jay would make a tasty and convenient last meal.
Jay is thoroughly suckered by Humbolt tentacles, nipped by its giant parrot beak, scalded by the whale’s stomach acid, geysered by various other gross fluids, squeezed, twisted, and kneaded by the whale’s fleshy innards, and generally mangled beyond recognition. All of the proceedings are conveniently illuminated by a singular jellyfish’s phosphor. For Jay, the jellyfish soon becomes what Wilson, the soccer ball, was for Tom Hanks in “Castaway.”
In the eventual hallucination brought on by the extreme situation, Jay flashes back, naturally, to the troubled relationship with the man whose expectations of him he could never live up to.
All a Metaphor?
It’s not a hallucination—director Brian Duffield’s fastidious quest to portray the anatomical accuracy of what it might look like to be swallowed by a whale puts it squarely in the genre of monster movie and spectacle. Unfortunately, exterior shots of the whale begin to look increasingly CGI, with an orca-pack attack appearing more like a video game than a Hollywood production.
We are enlightened by a variety of marine biology factoids, such as the fact that a “whale fall” is when a whale carcass sinks to the ocean floor and ends up providing nutrients for other sea creatures. Mitt’s on the ocean floor now, too, so that’s an obvious metaphor.
Jay does begin to hear snippets of Mitt’s disembodied oceanic wisdom in his head. Brolin’s words sound like the voice of Thanos (Brolin) raining down from Planet 0259-S. One half expects Mitt-Thanos-Obi-Wan to whisper “Use the force, Jay,” as he attempts to scrape a hole through whale intestines using a half-digested squid beak.
A number of these ocean-going New Age platitudes, like “The whale is forever,” sadly prompted audience snickering. I say sadly because one wanted to leave the movie theater with some good wisdom, you know?
But since a year or so after Jay’s post-cetacean-alimentary-tract ordeal, he appears as tentative, withdrawn, and boyish as ever—albeit acid-scarred—it would appear that Mitt has not, in fact, provided any good whalefall-type nutrients or father-son lessons to his boy.
Which ultimately makes “Whalefall” really more of a “Whalefail.”
‘Whalefall’
Director: Brian Duffield
Starring: Josh Brolin, Austin Abrams, John Ortiz, Elisabeth Shue
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hour, 46 minutes
Release Date: Oct. 16, 2026
Rating: 3 stars out of 5
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