I saw the M Rated
'WHALEFALL' earlier this week, and this American survival thriller film is Co-Written for the screen, Co-Produced and Directed by Brian Duffield in only his third feature film offering following
'Spontaneous' in 2020 and
'No One Will Save You' in 2023. He has recently been linked to Write and Direct
'Crumble' for Laika Studios and that he would also Direct and Co-Write with Zach Cregger a film based on Trevor Henderson's internet phenomenon
'Siren Head'. This film is based on the 2023 novel of the same name by Daniel Kraus. The film saw its World Premiere screening in London on 5th October and was released Stateside and here in Australia last week having so far grossed US$19M from a production budget of US$40M and generating mixed or average critical reviews.
Mitt Gardiner (Josh Brolin), a local deep sea dive expert and dive-boat captain, is diagnosed with terminal mesothelioma. Refusing to succumb to the illness, Mitt leaves sealed farewell letters for his wife and three children in a cooler on his boat, while his good friend Hewey (John Ortiz) continues fishing fully aware of Mitt's intentions. After strapping diving weights to himself, he leaps into the ocean off Northern California’s Monastery Beach to end his life. Hewey sobs as he hears the splash of Mitt entering the water. His body is never recovered, leaving his family to mourn with an empty casket.
One year later on the anniversary of Mitt's death, college student Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) returns home to California from Iowa deeply traumatised with the loss of his father. The two had a argumentative relationship, and Jay refused to speak with Mitt during his terminal illness or read the letter he left behind. To seek emotional closure, and to give his mother Zara (Elizabeth Shue) and sisters Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd) a piece of their father to properly bury, Jay sets out on an unauthorised, solo scuba dive to retrieve his father's remains, carrying a tank with one hour of air. We learn that Mitt taught Jay everything he knew about scuba diving, so he's no stranger to the sport, although hasn't dived for some time.
After about ten minutes from first entering the choppy sea conditions, Jay is deep underwater close to the edge of a submarine canyon, when he is caught in a battle between a giant squid and a sperm whale. When he tries to swim to the surface, the squid's tentacles wrap around his dive gear, and the whale sucks both the squid and Jay into its massive jaws before swallowing them.
Jay comes round inside the pitch-black, suffocating environment of one of the whale's four stomach chambers. He fights off the squid, which is then crushed to death by the powerful stomach walls. Determined to find a way out, Jay unknowingly crawls into the next chamber, where digestive juices and stomach acids begin to burn his hands and erode his dive gear, all while the squid's half-digested beak pierces his already dissolving hand. Realising this chamber is a point of no return with guaranteed death, Jay climbs back into the first chamber to plan another way to escape. With his oxygen depleting and surrounded by the whale's digestive system, Jay has a panic attack.
Jay pulls off the squids beak implanted in his hand and screams in excruciating pain in doing so. Improvising the squid's beak and the light of a recently swallowed bioluminescent jellyfish, Jay tries to climb up the whale's oesophagus to reach its mouth and escape to the ocean. When the creature briefly breaches the water to breathe, Jay desperately tries to call out to a nearby whalewatching tour boat, but his cries for help go unheeded. As the whale plunges down into the depths, the sudden downward momentum pins Jay against the stomach wall. The crushing water pressure punctures his eardrums and triggers bleeding from his nose, ears and mouth until he passes out.
Jay comes round again to discover he is almost completely out of time and almost out of oxygen. Giving up on a clear exit route, he furiously stabs the stomach wall with the squid's beak to force the whale to regurgitate him, but his efforts fail. Suddenly, the whale is ambushed by a pack of orcas. The predators' brutal onslaught prompts a nearby pod of sperm whales to gather around and drive the orcas away, leaving Jay's whale mortally wounded and slowly making its way up to the surface for more oxygen.
Deprived of his life saving oxygen and badly injured, Jay begins to accept the possibility of death and hallucinates conversations with his father. Jay apologises for failing to have deeper conversations with his Dad and for refusing to read his letter. The hallucination of his father gives him the mental clarity to remember a survival lesson. He realises that the whale’s internal decomposition and digestive tract have filled the stomach chambers with highly flammable methane gas. Jay constructs a makeshift explosive device using built up methane gas from the chamber, the mix of oxygen (at 79%) and nitrogen (at 21%) from his remaining scuba tank and a small bale of steel wool that he found earlier wrapped in a plastic bag inside the whale's gut, with batteries he brought down as dive weights to create an ignition spark. He uses the squid's beak to slice a hole into the stomach lining to wedge the makeshift explosive device in. The resulting blast blows a massive hole right through the side of the whale's stomach and body, that propels Jay up to the ocean's surface. He watches the whale's lifeless corpse sink out of view to the bottom of the ocean. A tour boat rescues him and tourniquets his left arm.
Some months later, Jay and his family are aboard Mitt's old boat. Jay, with scars to his face and neck and minus his left hand, finally reads the letter his father left him and is overcome with emotion, breaking down into tears while laughing. His mother calls out 'is it time to go home' to which Jay replies with 'yes'.
On paper and even in the shorts for this film, the plot seemed to be both audacious and too far fetched to be taken too seriously, but I have to admit that I was pleasantly surprised by the time the end credits rolled. The cinematography is top notch as are the visual effects of the whales innards, and Austin Abrams (fresh from the latest
'Resident Evil' movie), gives a noteworthy performance as the seriously put-upon scuba diver trapped in such a claustrophobic and alien environment, whose emotions are mostly seen in his eyes through his diving mask. Interspersed with all the action inside the guts of the whale, there are flashbacks to Jay's broken relationship with his father Mitt, and some of the lessons handed down from father to son that ultimately stand Jay in good stead, and are instrumental in his eventual survival, but these scenes are also peppered with a smattering of schmaltz. With a unique setting, and as a survival thriller film it works well enough if you are prepared to suspend all belief in the premise, and leave your brain at the theatre door.
'Whalefall' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five claps.
-Steve, at Odeon Online-
