{"id":934371,"date":"2026-10-15T20:50:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T20:50:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/934371\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T20:50:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T20:50:10","slug":"whalefall-review-austin-abrams-goes-into-the-belly-of-the-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/934371\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Whalefall’ review: Austin Abrams goes into the belly of the beast"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A roughneck sailor named Mitt (Josh Brolin<\/a>) delivers a drunken sermon to his son, Jay (Austin Abrams<\/a>), whom he treats like a scrawny disappointment. The Inuit, Mitt says, use every part of a whale as food, tools and cultural sacrament. Add family therapy to that list.<\/p>\n

Brian Duffield\u2019s<\/a> intriguingly deep \u201cWhalefall,\u201d based on the 2023 novel by recent Pulitzer winner Daniel Kraus<\/a>, opens with abusive Mitt\u2019s death by suicide. In bitterness and grief, Jay goes scuba diving to recover his father\u2019s body and gets swallowed by a sperm whale. Confinement gives Jay time to think. But not much time \u2014 his oxygen tank only contains an hour of air.<\/p>\n

Is that his dad\u2019s voice Jay hears gurgling from the beast\u2019s belly? Or does he just have the bends?<\/p>\n

Adapted by Duffield and Kraus, \u201cWhalefall\u201d is a heart-tugger tangled in a survival tale \u2014 or, arguably, a biologically accurate spin on \u201cPinocchio.\u201d The emotions are real; the sentimental orchestral score by Joseph Trapanese<\/a> goes overboard. (Knuckle-tatted Mitt seems like he\u2019d prefer a raunchy sea shanty.) Yet, this tense adventure makes a strong case that bad parents can still teach good lessons, even when a kid strives to live in opposition to their folks.<\/p>\n

In scenes at Jay\u2019s childhood home, his mother (Elisabeth Shue<\/a>) and older sisters (Jane Levy<\/a> and Emily Rudd<\/a>) have a lightness that implies how much harder Mitt was on his only son, aggravated that he\u2019d spawned not a mini-me but a mini-meh. Loner Jay has grown up to shun his father\u2019s interests \u2014 or anyone\u2019s help, period \u2014 an independence that, should he survive, he may come to realize isn\u2019t so different from his dad after all.<\/p>\n

But first, he\u2019s got to get out of these guts. Having been gobbled up like a meal worm, Jay dredges up flashbacks of his father\u2019s lectures in whale anatomy. Meanwhile, the film works to wring out a tear, occasionally squeezing too hard, but earning several sad sighs of recognition.<\/p>\n

Set off the California coast near Monterey Bay, \u201cWhalefall\u201d is shot by Aaron Morton to look realistic. This Pacific Ocean is the true one: silty, cold, gray and hostile. As Jay waddles into the water, the waves seem to want to shove the reedy young man back to shore. Once he\u2019s managed to hurl himself past the surf to rest atop an underwater cliff, the darkness below is as scary as if we\u2019d regressed into primordial prey.<\/p>\n

The whale attack is a tragedy of happenstance and filmed as chaotically as if it were happening to the camera. It\u2019d be nice to see more of it, but at least we feel the visceral terror of a whammy of sonar, a lashing from its muscular tongue and the velocity that hurls Jay from the mouth to the throat, then squashes him into its stomach.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s seat-shaking violence in how the whale breaches the surface and slams its weight back down (the crafty sound design is by James Miller) and body horror in its claustrophobic, spongy inner chambers. Which wet hole is the way out \u2014 and which leads to a pool of skin-melting digestive acid? Sure, in space no one can hear you scream. But underwater, we grit our teeth at Jay\u2019s every fluttering breath.<\/p>\n

I read \u201cWhalefall\u201d when it was first published and couldn\u2019t imagine how the book could be turned into a film. Everything seemed against it, from the heavy narration to the creature\u2019s dark insides and the lead\u2019s isolated gloom. At least \u201c127 Hours\u201d<\/a> had lovely shots of Utah.<\/p>\n

Some challenges are fixable. The whale\u2019s gullet is flickeringly lit by a bioluminescent jellyfish that Jay sort of befriends. To the film\u2019s credit, every animal acts like it has as much right to exist as this out-of-his-ecosystem human. An aggressive squid is so angry to be eaten that it made me regret sampling live sashimi in Koreatown.<\/p>\n

Other pitfalls just have to be forgiven, like when Abrams has to explain how he\u2019s feeling with an air hose between his teeth. The script wisely cuts back on some of the book\u2019s cuteness, only sparingly making Jay refer to a makeshift tool by its pet name, \u201cBeaky.\u201d Still, he\u2019s compelled to say something every so often and each time we want to scream that he\u2019s wasting his precious oxygen. A couple seemingly significant lines of dialogue come out garbled through the mouthpiece. I say seemingly because I honestly couldn\u2019t tell you what they were, but the tenor felt important.<\/p>\n

Abrams is well-cast in the role, not only because last month\u2019s \u201cResident Evil\u201d proved he can hold the screen pretty much by himself. Though he began acting as a teenager with stints on \u201cThe Walking Dead\u201d<\/a> and \u201cEuphoria\u201d<\/a> and continues to get cast as characters younger than he is, he\u2019s never had that overly polished child-performer charm. Instead, he comes across as scruffy and vulnerable \u2014 even as the spooked junkie in \u201cWeapons,\u201d<\/a> in which he seemed to mimic a cartoon cat. Check him out alongside Ben Stiller in Mike White\u2019s underseen 2017 anxiety dramedy \u201cBrad\u2019s Status\u201d<\/a> if you haven\u2019t, and you may sense what I did: a precocious talent biding his time until his roles grew up. This fall feels like his graduation party. <\/p>\n

Given the compressed running time, the film has more memories of Mitt appearing practical and wise than of being a bastard. To make that point, it leans on one awful boat trip scene that starts with Mitt smashing a beer can on his forehead until it bleeds. We get more shivers from a glimpse of a very young Jay nervously calling his father \u201cSir\u201d than we do from Brolin barking caricature-style that \u201cThere\u2019s more to existence than fun!\u201d Occasionally, the blunt-headed whale seems to resemble Brolin himself. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing this on what would have been my dad\u2019s birthday, a kind man who passed away when I was roughly Jay\u2019s age. He was no Mitt and I don\u2019t believe in ghosts. Nevertheless, I, too, am aware of my father\u2019s voice. Sometimes our rational understanding of life and death bumps into a seemingly impossible presence. That\u2019s the big idea churning under \u201cWhalefall\u2019s\u201d surface.<\/p>\n

‘Whalefall’<\/p>\n

Rated: PG-13, for peril, violent content, bloody images, some strong language, and thematic content<\/p>\n

Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes<\/p>\n

Playing: Opens Friday, Oct. 16 in wide release<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A roughneck sailor named Mitt (Josh Brolin) delivers a drunken sermon to his son, Jay (Austin Abrams), whom…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":934372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[40253,261930,49,48,22226,428,75,27960,1554,24548,320409,14158,320407,337,5355,320408,320410,44315,162765],"class_list":["post-934371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-austin-abrams","tag-brian-duffield","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-dad","tag-death","tag-entertainment","tag-father","tag-film","tag-jay","tag-jay-time","tag-josh-brolin","tag-mitt","tag-movies","tag-tool","tag-tooth","tag-true-one","tag-whale","tag-whalefall"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/934372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}