‘Whalefall’ Plays Its Absurd Premise Totally Straight

“You’ve got soft lungs! Soft lungs!”

That’s the parting insult Josh Brolin’s gruff, ocean-obsessed Mitt Gardiner lays on his son Jay at the end of a drunken excoriation on the family boat. Like the rest of Whalefall, writer-director Brian Duffield’s new nautical survival film, “Soft lungs!” is not played for laughs. There’s no wink here. This film — about a young man who is swallowed by a sperm whale while looking for his father’s remains — is played totally straight.

Jay is played by Austin Abrams, who utilizes a lot of the same shrieking panic we saw him deftly deploy during his recent star turn in Resident Evil. (Between this film and that one, Abrams has the market cornered on any “Slimiest Movies of 2026” lists that might drop between now and January.) Whalefall, like so many genre films of the past decade, centers on grief. In this case, Jay’s grief over the loss of his father, a coastal California scuba-diver-for-hire with terminal mesothelioma who took his own life by throwing himself into his beloved ocean. Jay, meeker than his alpha father but still trained in the ways of the sea, sets out to find Mitt's body. He suits up and grabs an oxygen tank, heads for the ocean, and within minutes is swallowed (but not chewed) by one of the largest mammals on the planet.  

I haven't read the novel the film is based on, but sources tell me Whalefall generally adheres to its source material. The machinations of the plot raise a lot of questions that might best be answered by a marine biologist, and I won’t spoil the various slimy happenings here, except to say there’s loads of grief, daddy trauma and flashbacks (some of them featuring Elisabeth Shue, who plays Jay’s mom) to undergird Whalefall’s relatively thin premise. And that's pretty necessary, as Jay sets out with about an hour’s worth of oxygen — that’s the ticking clock we’re up against. 

Whalefall’s biggest strength is Abrams’ performance. His panic, shot at very close proximity by Duffield and cinematographer Aaron Morton, is palpable. There are some shots in this film that are genuinely unlike anything I’ve ever seen on the big screen, many of them utilizing impressive practical effects. The in-the-whale shots themselves add up to an impressive feat of filmmaking, and I’ll say this: At no point did I have any clue what the hell was going to happen next.

But ultimately, the film’s mawkish, sappy message — perhaps the true father figures are the whales we meet along the way — jams up what might’ve been a silly, fun-for-the-sake-of-fun survival romp. Whalefall is not the campy, self-aware curio some expect. Your mileage may vary, based on how large a serving of schmaltz you can stomach alongside your "guy stuck in a whale" entrée.