‘WHALEFALL’ Turns an Unfilmable Scuba Diver Mukbang Into an Underwater Thriller

When I read Daniel Kraus’ Whalefall, all I could think was: how the fuck are they gonna turn this into a movie? The kind of story that should be borderline impossible to adapt, given that the vast majority of it unfolds inside a sperm whale’s digestive tract with much of the rest told in flashback, left director Brian Duffield with his work cut out for him. Fortunately he armed himself with his own trusty beaky and carved away, turning what most would have considered unfilmable into an effective, if imperfect, translation.

Kraus, who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for his WWI one-sentence horror novel Angel Down, adapts his own 2023 bestseller with a great deal of commitment to what he originally put on the page. Arguably too much commitment. Whalefall carries forward the novel’s central story about a difficult father-son relationship and the lessons, damage, and survival instincts passed from one generation to the next, and it does so with a fidelity that rarely lets the movie out of the book’s shadow.

Austin Abrams plays Jay, son of local diving legend Mitt (Josh Brolin), a man as knowledgeable about the sea, marine life, and diving as he is hard on his kid. Mitt imparts lessons through bullying, belittling, and a particularly outdated strain of machismo-heavy boomer fatherdom. His intentions may be good, at least in his own mind, toughening the boy up so he can survive whatever life throws at him, but his methods create a wedge between father and son that eventually grows to the size of the Mariana Trench. Their relationship ruptures aboard the whale-watching boat Mitt operates after lung cancer prevents him from diving, and Jay never sees his father alive again.

The film begins, in a slight deviation from the book, with Mitt’s suicide. The novel lives more fully inside Jay’s perspective, giving us greater access to his plans, logic, and emotional state, while the movie has less ability to rely on that interior framing. Jay returns home a year after his father’s death intending to dive for his remains, only to get caught in the middle of a saltwater battle between an aging sperm whale and a giant squid and somehow wind up inside the whale itself. Jonah-style. Duffield does wonderful work translating the more obviously cinematic portions of the book, with the whale-versus-squid encounter becoming a genuinely striking piece of spectacle.

Once Jay gets swallowed, Whalefall really starts flexing its gut muscles, and this is the one arena where the movie decisively beats the book. In my brief Goodreads blurb, I described it as a “scubadiver-mukbang”, and the film helps make that digestive process literal. The whale interiors are awesome: goopy, gross, wet, constricting, and palpably alive. Abrams is clearly interacting with the space around him rather than floating through some anonymous digital void, which makes every squeeze, burn, and desperate attempt to breathe feel physical.

The camera gets claustrophobically close to his face, trapping us inside this fleshy coffin with him and turning what could have looked ridiculous into something suffocating. There are stretches where the movie edges fully into horror, as Jay is crushed, burned, digested, deprived of oxygen, and generally subjected to every nightmare scenario one could imagine after being swallowed alive. No sentence Kraus wrote can do what this looks like.

[READ MORE: Our review of ‘Resident Evil’ directed by Zach Cregger and starring Austin Abrams] 

It also moves, which is no small feat for a movie that spends most of its 106 minutes inside a single location with a single actor who can barely speak. Duffield keeps finding new ways to escalate the predicament, and the flashbacks arrive often enough to break the pressure without ever derailing it.

The trickier material is everything that works because it’s on the page. Kraus wrote a novel whose best material is unfilmable by design: Jay’s time inside the esophagus and stomach runs alongside his own thoughts and memories of Mitt, past lessons gradually hardening into survival tactics. Then he went and filmed it anyway. Duffield avoids drowning the thing in voiceover, which is the right call, but the tradeoff is that Jay’s interiority, and the complexity of what he actually feels toward his father, becomes harder to unpack. Abrams spends enormous stretches acting with a regulator stuffed in his mouth, barely able to move or speak, and brings enough physicality to sell the panic, pain, calculation, and exhaustion anyway.

Brolin is good as the gruff, overbearing patriarch, selling the complexity of a father who wants to shape his son into someone capable of surviving the world but can’t rein in his commandeering instincts long enough to recognize the damage he’s doing. The problem is less the performance than the familiarity of it. Brolin has played versions of this hard-edged, emotionally constipated father enough times that the casting feels almost too obvious for a movie otherwise taking substantial swings.

The thematic soul of Kraus’ novel survives intact. Whalefall is about difficult fathers and the sons who reject the way they were parented, only to discover that some of those lessons lodged themselves inside anyway. Jay wants desperately to separate himself from Mitt, but survival continually requires him to draw on the very things his father drilled into him. There’s something painful in that contradiction. The person who wounded you can still leave you with the tools that save your life.

[READ MORE: Our review of ‘The Whale’ directed by Darron Aronofsky and starring Brendan Fraser] 

Which brings us back to the fidelity, both the adaptation’s strength and its ceiling. Whalefall takes on material that seemed almost hilariously unfilmable and translates the physical experience remarkably well while preserving most of the emotional architecture between Jay and Mitt. It just rarely feels interested in reinterpreting the novel so much as carrying it faithfully from one medium to another. For a movie willing to take such a technical risk, the creative choices remain surprisingly safe. It’s a hell of a thing to have pulled off, and I’m not sure I need to watch it again.

The ending lands, though, and Duffield adds an epilogue absent from the novel that resolves a few lingering emotional threads without feeling like a sacrilegious add-on. That helps the film stand more firmly on its own two feet. Whalefall may not reinvent its source material, but it proves the impossible adaptation was possible after all: gross, claustrophobic, emotionally bruised, and anchored by a terrific physical performance from Abrams.

CONCLUSION: Director Brian Duffield has filmed the unfilmable, making sperm whale interiors into a genuine feat of claustrophobic craft. Whalefall moves well, pains and crunches impressively, and gives Austin Abrams a hell of a physical showcase. It just never quite escapes the novel it’s determined to honor.

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