REVIEW: ‘Whalefall’ Is Incredible Inside And Weak Outside

Brian Duffield wrote and directed an incredible survivor movie with a weak exterior. Based on co-screenwriter Daniel Kraus’s book of the same name, Whalefall is a can’t-miss thriller, but with dialogue and performances so weak they almost ruin it. Jay’s (Austin Abrams) struggle to survive being swallowed by a whale stands as a powerful feat of filmmaking, but flashbacks to his strained relationship with his insufferable father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), threaten to tank the experience nearly every time.

It’s not enough just to have a movie about surviving being swallowed by a whale, apparently. You need to have motivation. The audience needs a reason to want Jay to survive, beyond the fact that surviving would be nice. If there wasn’t an external motivation, Whalefall would probably be too formulaic: progress, setbacks, and an inevitable escape and rescue. 

Poor dialogue weighs down a sensational thriller.

For Jay, the motivation is his late father. Before Mitt died, he and Jay clearly weren’t on the best terms. Jay is angry at his father for dying as much as he’s angry at him for how he was raised. This is the kind of father Jay had to call sir. And Josh Brolin lays it on terribly thick. Every single flashback scene shows the man berating Jay or pushing him past a reasonable point to follow in his footsteps as a diver.

It’s a classic formula, but there aren’t nearly enough soft spots to endear you to Mitt or his relationship with Jay. Brolin plays the character as aggravating to watch, as Jay feels about being around him. He’s aggressive, he gets drunk, and he waxes on and on about the power of the ocean and a pseudo-spirituality that feels totally inauthentic. That point becomes especially salient as Jay’s plight deepens and Whalefall tangles thematically with that spiritualism. Abrams is a mixed bag at best. His survival scenes are excellent, but his acting against Brolin is flat.

The dialogue doesn’t help. Nearly every line is exposition. There are some tender moments towards the end, to be sure, but mostly, the language feels unnatural. Every spoken word either explains what the characters feel or what they are doing, instead of just showing it. It’s much too heavy-handed. Even while Jay is inside the whale, he talks to himself a lot, which in itself doesn’t feel out of place, but some of his internal monologue is still as overly expository as his dialogue.

Whalefall’s innard sets are spectacular.

Everything inside the whale, though? Incredible. It’s not like the idea of a person being swallowed by a whale is new; many ancient mythologies have dabbled with it, and people have riffed on it ever since. But have you ever really considered what surviving the inside of a whale might entail? Because Whalefall has, and it does a spectacular job of bringing that imagination to life.

The inside of the whale looks fantastic. The claustrophobic space is disgustingly organic, shot from angles that feel possible only from within that stomach. When things shake, you feel the pressure. The sound design is sensational, providing perfect tension with every rumble.

The lighting, too, is excellent. It finds exactly the right balance between bright enough to actually see but realistically dark, thanks to clever use of natural light sources. Even still, there are a few times throughout Whalefall when the movie becomes hard to follow because it’s too dark or shaking too fast, but they’re quickly forgivable.

Whalefall is such a great survival thriller; it’s a shame that everything else is so poor.

Less forgivable is how bad the whale looks from the outside. The inside is so painstakingly designed, looking quite practical and fully realistic. The outside of the whale, however, is a regrettable CGI model. It looks so terribly fake. Partly because Whalefall strives to look so realistic. But even if the whale’s shape is realistic, it doesn’t match what you imagine a whale looks like in your head. Nonetheless, the bad CGI is just so hard to stand next to the beautiful shots of California, amazing underwater photography, and the exceptional sets for the inside of the whale.

Whalefall is such a great survival thriller; it’s a shame that everything else is so poor. With better dialogue and a more interesting relationship between Jay and his father than what we get, the movie would soar. Instead, it’s an exciting movie half the time and a drag the other half. It will be a cult footnote in the genre instead of the all-timer it deserves to be.

Whalefall is in theaters everywhere October 16th, 2026.