19/10/26

Cineworld, Edinburgh

As high-concept movies go, Whalefall is right up there with the highest of them. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that this is a story about a guy who gets swallowed by a whale. Based on the bestselling novel by Daniel Kraus (and inspired, I suspect, by the story of Pinocchio), this is a gruelling, claustrophobic tale of survival against all the odds. Whether such a thing is actually possible is hard to say – to my knowledge, nobody has ever managed to escape from the belly of such a beast – but director Brian Duffield (who co-wrote the screenplay with Kraus) does make it all feel horribly plausible.

The guy in question is Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams, an actor clearly on a roll since working with Zach Creggar on Weapons). Abrams is likeable enough to make us care about Jay’s fate and to identify with him in the film’s early scenes, where he’s mourning his seafaring father’s suicide. Mitt (Josh Brolin) was an Alpha-male, forever pushing his son to ‘grow up’ and ‘be a man’ but Jay has always kept a cautious distance from his macho influence. Grief and a sense of lost opportunities motivate him to don a wetsuit and an oxygen tank and swim out to the area where Mitt was last seen, looking for answers.

Which is when a sperm whale comes along, mouth wide open, chasing a giant squid…

I’ve never been inside a whale (I know this will come as a surprise to many) but the cramped pulsating chambers of the whale’s gut depicted here feel all too believable and the fact that Jay’s oxygen supply is running out is apparent from the very start. Inside the whale, Jay recollects his father’s teachings and it begins to dawn on him (and us) that any hope of escape from his situation depends entirely on Mitt’s rambling observations from across the years… oh, and did I mention that the giant squid is also in the same space and still very much alive?

Weighing in at one hour and forty-six minutes, Whalefall manages to keep me in its tentacle-like grip for the film’s duration – indeed, at times, I’m actually holding my breath as an already bad situation grows steadily worse. Abrams, who recently went through hell in Resident Evil ,goes through an entirely more realistic hell here, while Brolin proves once again that he’s capable of making the most unsympathetic character likeable.

While I remain unsure as to whether the story’s resolution is possible, it’s expertly handled and I leave the cinema feeling that I have just undergone the equivalent of a storm-tossed odyssey, with a side helping of emotional distress.

This isn’t exactly a feelgood film, but its conclusion is weirdly uplifting after all the trauma that’s just played out. Now excuse me while I cross ‘swimming with whales’ off my bucket list.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney