It's based on Daniel Kraus's bestseller, but something got lost in translation. But it doesn’t work out that way. The movie comes closer to doing for whales what “Howard the Duck” did for barnyard superheroes — it makes you never want to see one of them again.
Whales, of course, are beautiful creatures, and the one in “Whalefall” is a sperm whale with the boxy shape of a submarine, long and angular, a sleekly gliding beast that rules the ocean. Yet for most of the movie, we’re inside that whale. The central character, Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams), has gone scuba diving off the coast of Monastery Beach near Monterey, Ca., in search of the body of his father, a gruff seaman who committed suicide. (He had mesothelioma, a form of cancer that meant he couldn’t dive anymore; for him, that meant life was no longer worth living.) After submerging himself, Jay gets entangled in the tentacles of a giant squid, and that’s when the whale, who feeds on squid, pulls both Jay and the squid into his oversize gaping mouth.
Moments later, Jay is trapped inside, surrounded by gooey protrusions of undulating flesh. For the rest of the movie, he’ll attempt to survive inside that whale, which means keeping himself from getting sucked out of the creature’s digestive antechamber (which glows phosphorescent blue) and into its inner stomach cavity (which glows a hellish red), where the stomach acid will start to dissolve him. For a moment, it occurred to me that Jay might run into his father, à la Jonah or Geppetto.
But no, he’s on his own, doing all he can to escape this tight squeeze of whale flesh. The place Jay finds himself looks like a colonoscopy designed by H.R. The visual effects are…okay.
At times, it’s as if we were locked in some pop-up theme-park ride called Full Cavity Search. At one point, Jay uses a jellyfish the whale has eaten to light his way, and that’s as close as he comes to finding a companion. It should have been called “Project Hail Fish Guts.” Watching “Whalefall,” I kept thinking, “Why would anyone want to see this movie?” But the answer is obvious.
But something got lost in the translation. The thuddingly literal-minded movie that director Brian Duffield has made of it is a piece of thriller kitsch, full of unintentional laughs. With a hero who spends the heart of the film sucking on his oxygen mouthpiece, not so much talking as making frantic grunts of fear, “Whalefall” shuts us off from the most basic rooting interest.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
