If I could get swallowed by a whale and subsequently fight my way out in order to successfully process and move forward from my grief over the death of my father, I’d consider it. Thus are the prospects of Whalefall, a movie that is half about a man (Austin Abrams) literally trying to escape from the innards of a whale, and half about that same man’s rocky relationship with his demanding and now departed dad (Josh Brolin). As you can probably imagine, the fans of one of those kinds of movies are probably not going to be too interested in the other. I found the unique setting for a survival thriller to be fascinating, gross, imaginative, and slightly hard to visually decipher. When all you’re staring at are squishy parts of interior whale, it can be hard to determine exactly what you’re seeing. There are unique horrors, like the stomach acid of one of the four stomach chambers, and an extra threat with an irate squid also swallowed and fighting for its life. That stuff has a gnarly entertainment value, elevated by the physical endurance of Abrams, who has to act with an oxygen breather in his mouth for most of the film. When the movie slides into the touchy-feely stuff without the whale guts, it can’t help but feel less unique. The structure of the screenplay, adapted by the director Brian Duffield (Spontaneous), follows a track where our protagonist has a convenient memory with dear old dad for everything whale-survival related. The grieving and regret are given due reverence rather than feeling like some existential checklist for added dramatic weight to spiffy up the body horror. It’s meaningful but a bit blandly explored, relying upon a more generic framing for the audience to project their own personal familiar grief onto this guy. At one point, the whale becomes the spiritual embodiment of his dad, and he’s directly talking to it/him, and I wondered if maybe the best version of this movie would be a hypoxia triptych of spiritual need. By the end, I don’t know if the gooey journey was enough for the catharsis, but then again, I haven’t been swallowed by a whale. Yet.

Nate’s Grade: B-