Whalefall (2026)

Nobody lists being swallowed by a sperm whale among the hazards of scuba diving, and the science explains why. Sperm whales hunt in the deep, far below where a diver would swim, and a multi-chambered stomach that processes giant squid would dispatch a human long before the oxygen ran low. I set all of that aside early. Whalefall asks for a large act of faith, and it rewards that faith with a thriller I enjoyed far more than its premise deserves.

Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) is a young man still raw from the death of his gruff, estranged father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). He dives off the California coast to find his father’s remains, and an 80-foot sperm whale swallows him. His air will last about an hour. Brian Duffield directs and co-wrote the script with Daniel Kraus, whose 2023 novel supplies the story, and the finished film runs a tight 106 minutes.

The whale’s belly is the star. Aaron Morton’s cinematography turns the dark interior into a slick, shuddering place, and the space behaves like an animal’s body rather than a set that holds still. Abrams, fresh from running away from the infected in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, now spends most of a film cramped and injured. He lets Jay look undignified, which makes the fear believable. One sequence before the swallowing, when Jay blunders into the path of the whale as it hunts, is staged with a relentless menace that had me flinching.

Under the slime sits a claim about inheritance: what a father teaches his son, even a gruff father, outlasts him, and the son can put it to work. When the film lets that idea drive the plot, as Jay’s old lessons become tools for staying alive, theme and thriller turn into the same thing. That is the best of it. A scene in which father and son weep together is rare in a mainstream thriller, and Brolin gives it real weight.

But the argument comes with an interruption. The film runs two timelines, the hour inside the whale and the past behind it, and the cutting between them is where the trouble starts. Flashbacks keep halting a ticking clock to deliver a family drama (Elisabeth Shue as Jay’s mother, Zara; Jane Levy and Emily Rudd as his sisters; John Ortiz as Hewey), and each time the pressure bleeds away. The idea of memory as a companion in the dark is sound. The execution too often trades suspense for explanation.

The film also takes itself too seriously. A story this ridiculous works best when it knows it, and Duffield plays it with a solemnity that sometimes fights the material, while a few threads trail off without resolution. A little more mischief would have helped.

Still, the whole thing hangs together better than it has any right to. This is a survival thriller for people who can accept an absurd premise played straight, and who can stomach the slime and gore that come with a whale’s digestive tract. Sticklers for plausibility should skip it. Everyone else will find a good, tense piece of entertainment with real feeling behind it.