Inside the whale in Whalefall, breathing has a sound, a duration and a consequence. Jay Gardiner, played by Austin Abrams, is off the California coast looking for his father’s remains when a sperm whale swallows him. What follows sounds like the sort of dare a movie issues to itself. It has to make a body understandable as a place without ever making it seem like a room, and it has to make a limited supply of air felt before an audience becomes accustomed to watching the gauge. Brian Duffield is better at those problems than the synopsis might suggest.
A scuba diver already has an interesting relationship to scale. At the surface Jay can look like a young man who has brought the right equipment for a difficult job. Inside the animal, his equipment gives him one of the few sets of measurements he trusts. Getting that distinction across is a matter of sound and light as much as production design. A lamp is useful for however far it reaches. A breath can be reassuring when it comes and worrying for exactly the same reason. The situation is most frightening when Jay can establish what one part of it is doing and has no means of seeing how that part fits into the whole animal.
The sequence that brings Jay inside begins with the whale going after a giant squid. That matters to the film’s account of danger. Jay has entered the water with a human reason of unusual importance to him and a routine feeding encounter can cancel it almost by accident. The disparity gives the effects a cleaner job than making the animal scary in the usual sense. The scale of the appetite is sufficient. Duffield can return to this elementary indifference every time the family story is in danger of assigning Jay’s predicament an excessively tidy meaning.
Abrams is good at making an attempt look provisional. The body can start to act before the face has registered whether a maneuver was wise. That is valuable in a film where the central performer is often denied ordinary ways to tell us what he is thinking. The gear and the space reduce his expressive range, and the smaller range makes panic easier to distinguish from a plan. Jay’s competence matters because there is time to watch him spend it. The film’s best suspense comes from decisions that carry a cost whether or not they work.
Duffield and Daniel Kraus, adapting Kraus’s novel, give Jay a second problem. His father, Mitt, is both the reason he went into the water and part of the education he takes down with him. Josh Brolin can make a father’s conviction sound like a test his son never agreed to take. A remembered boat outing, including the ugly gesture of Mitt crushing a beer can against his head, gives that conviction a physical form. What Jay remembers can be of practical use without becoming something he has to approve. There is a fine, uncomfortable drama in that distinction.
The flashbacks also interrupt a relationship the film has taken care to establish between our sense of time and Jay’s air supply. Some earn the interruption by changing what we understand about his next move. Others explain the hurt that Abrams has already made visible. The distinction becomes sharper as the film uses Mitt’s voice to keep the emotional conflict close. A remembered instruction can arrive with remarkable force inside a survival story. The father-son material loses some of its power when the voice is present often enough to sound like another person narrating the dive.
The title offers a second, larger scale of time. Mitt tells Jay that the body of a dead whale can sustain life after it comes to rest on the ocean floor. In the immediate crisis, Jay is calculating the minutes his own body can continue to function. The juxtaposition has a force even without a line explaining what the ecosystem might stand for. The father who passed on that knowledge has left harm behind him as well as something useful. Jay can decide which of those things to carry, but the decision has more credibility when it remains tied to the task in his hands.
There is an honest tension between the two impulses. A movie this interested in an animal’s material reality has good reason to resist making it an elaborate illustration of a young man’s grief. The whale’s scale and indifference offer a way out of that problem. Jay can be having the most consequential hour of his life while the animal continues to inhabit a set of needs that has almost nothing to do with him. The film makes that disproportion visceral. The more pressure it applies to resolve the family story at the same time, the more it deprives the predicament of its marvelous strangeness.
There is a gentler possibility in the presence of the other people on shore. A family with the same dead man in its history will have more than one account of what he took from them and what he taught them. Elisabeth Shue, Jane Levy and Emily Rudd suggest the outlines of those other lives. Their relative distance is understandable in a picture designed to isolate Jay, though the stories leave the film leaning very heavily on his relationship with Mitt. The hardest question for a survivor may be what to do with a memory that would sound different if someone else in the family told it.
