Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Brian Duffield
Starring: Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy, Emily Rudd
A boy is swallowed whole and a bunch of survival thriller clichés are spat out in director Brian Duffield's adaptation of Daniel Kraus's novel Whalefall. That book was well received, and I imagine this story makes for a page-turner. But it's one that doesn't translate well to the screen, set as it is within the dimly lit bowels of a giant mammal.
With the recent Resident Evil, Austin Abrams proved himself capable of single-handedly shouldering a feature film. He's a likeable, relatable performer who has a vulnerability missing from many of today's young musclebound male stars. He's given a similar task by Duffield, being the only human on screen for most of Whalefall's run time. But here, Abrams' face is covered with goggles and the situation forces him to mumble his dialogue while breathing through an oxygen tank, a tough task for any actor. Mandy Moore pulled off the feat in 47 Metres Down, but that movie's director, the under-rated Johannes Roberts, wisely took creative liberties to ensure his leading lady's expressive eyes were visible at all times. Duffield opts for a more realistic aesthetic, with the whale innards lit by the glow of a jellyfish. It's to the film's detriment, as Abrams is unable to express himself.
Abrams' Jay Gardiner (the name presumably a double nod to Jonah and Jaws) finds himself in dat fish's abdomen when he dives into the ocean in search of the body of his father Mitt (Josh Brolin), who decided to end it all by diving into the sea after struggles with cancer. Perhaps the biggest cliché in 21st century cinema is the trope of the protagonist of a survival thriller being weighed down by trauma relating to a dead loved one. Whalefall leans heavily into this conceit, peppering its main storyline with flashbacks detailing Jay's contentious relationship with his macho father.
Duffield's film plays out like a mash-up of two Danny Boyle movies, combining the precarious predicament of 127 Hours with Slumdog Millionaire's shtick of a protagonist achieving a goal by thinking back to earlier moments in their life. Jay mentally replays arguments and confrontational moments with his blowhard dad, only to realise that the old man was teaching him things about survival he can now put into practice. It's a nice idea, but it was handled far more successfully in Incident On and Off a Mountain Road, the Don Coscarelli-directed episode of the horror anthology show Masters of Horror, in which a woman draws on her experiences with her paranoid survivalist ex-husband to outwit her current stalker.
Aside from it not being conducive to highlighting an actor's performance, the film's unique setting is difficult to portray on screen without seeming a little hokey. Jay's attempts to squeeze through various parts of the whale's innards suggest deleted scenes from the sperm sequence of Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. I have no doubt that everything we see here is anatomically correct and even though there have been real life cases of humans surviving similar ordeals, Whalefall nevertheless fails to make its set-up seem plausible.
Whalefall is in UK/ROI cinemas from October 16th.
