Kelp!: "Whalefall"

Brian Duffield's Whalefall has one of the daffier conceits you will see an American studio movie proceed from in 2026: this is, to some degree, Hollywood taking the Book of Jonah at face value. A year after the mysterious suicide of his diver father at sea, grief-stricken college kid Jay (Austin Abrams) returns to the bay where pop took his final plunge and starts scouring the ocean floor in a bid to retrieve his father's remains. The opening stretch of Duffield's film does much to show off the advances made in underwater photography in recent years: we can discern every passing frond and fish Jay encounters beneath the waves, before the film arrives at a pivotal pause on the brink of an ominous abyss, into which our kid will make a fateful descent of his own. He is, we fear, getting rapidly out of his depth, a suspicion only confirmed after Jay gets snarled up in the backwash of a fight between a giant squid and a passing sperm whale, and - worse still - is swallowed up by the latter. Suddenly the screen floods with picture-book images of which Jules Verne himself might have approved. Here's our guy clinging onto the whale's front incisors for dear life; here he is trying to avoid a clubbing from the creature's heavy, lolling tongue; and now here he is in the whale's stomach, having to rely on the phosphorescence of the whale's largely liquid lunch (parbroiled jellyfish with a sprig of plankton) to help light his way. That's right: it's a Hollywood movie where the hero spends almost the entire running time literally in the belly of the beast. Whatever else Visionary Filmmaker Christopher Nolan™ pulled off with this summer's The Odyssey, he never thought to give us that.

Co-written by Duffield with Daniel Kraus (adapting his own fiction bestseller), the film that results is a curious hybrid, splashing around between a number of genres and never quite making dry land. (Hence the critical bafflement.) Some considerable part of Whalefall steers close to boys'-own adventure territory: Jay is trying to prove himself to the memory of an overbearing father (Josh Brolin, in prologue and semi-regular flashbacks) who once accused his boy of having "weak lungs". At times, something more horrific drifts into view, akin to an Alien movie that aligns us with the perspective of John Hurt's chestburster, or a damper, stickier Cube: Jay has to navigate his host's duodenum, the intestines large and small, each cavity and chamber posing its own challenges. There's even something of the generic prison-break movie sloshing around in here: consider it Jacques Cousteau's The Shawshank Redemption. Whalefall gives good production design (by Ramsey Avery), even if it's not always clear where we are and what Abrams, obliged by circumstance to keep the mouthpiece of his breathing apparatus in place, is trying to articulate. (A prevailing limitation: this is, shall we say, not the most relatable crisis into which a movie has pitched its audience.) Those sporadic, Slumdog-like flashbacks - revealing Jay had the solutions to his problems all along - would seem very rote were it not for Brolin, having an absolute ball as a heavily tatted, highly individualistic old salt. (This is recognisably the Brolin of the actor's recent memoir.) By contrast, Elisabeth Shue and Jane Levy are mostly wasted as our guy's mom and sister: it is, in the end, another all-American dads-and-lads tale, one that falls short of the cosmic, circle-of-life scale Duffield and Kraus are aiming for, instead landing closer to Ad Astra on a budget. My suspicion was that Whalefall might have been tossed out like chum in the January dumping grounds had it not been for the success of the recent, Abrams-starring Resident Evil redo, yet it's the kind of semi-diverting goof you watch with a smile on your face and a chuckle never too far from your lips. (How on earth did anyone sign off on this?) It's not good, exactly, but it might slip down well with a big bucket of salted popcorn; the delicate ecosystem of the multiplex will always feel healthier for a studio taking a modest gamble on a spitball like this, rather than betting the house on a film like Digger.

Whalefall is now showing in cinemas nationwide.