Review: 'Whalefall' is a tense survival story with guts, teeth and daddy issues that get a bit gooey
This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.
Set us as preferred A roughneck sailor named Mitt (Josh Brolin) delivers a drunken sermon to his son, Jay (Austin Abrams), whom he treats like a scrawny disappointment.The Inuit, Mitt says, use every part of a whale as food, tools and cultural sacrament.
Add family therapy to that list.Brian Duffield’s intriguingly deep “Whalefall,” based on the 2023 novel by recent Pulitzer winner Daniel Kraus, opens with abusive Mitt’s death by suicide.In bitterness and grief, Jay goes scuba diving to recover his father’s body and gets swallowed by a sperm whale.
Confinement gives Jay time to think.But not much time — his oxygen tank only contains an hour of air.Is that his dad’s voice Jay hears gurgling from the beast’s belly? Or does he just have the bends?Adapted by Duffield and Kraus, “Whalefall” is a heart-tugger tangled in a survival tale — or, arguably, a biologically accurate spin on “Pinocchio.” The emotions are real; the sentimental orchestral score by Joseph Trapanese goes overboard.
(Knuckle-tatted Mitt seems like he’d prefer a raunchy sea shanty.) Yet, this tense adventure makes a strong case that bad parents can still teach good lessons, even when a kid strives to live in opposition to their folks.In scenes at Jay’s childhood home, his mother (Elisabeth Shue) and older sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd) have a lightness that implies how much harder Mitt was on his only son, aggravated that he’d spawned not a mini-me but a mini-meh.Loner Jay has grown up to shun his father’s interests — or anyone’s help, period — an independence that, should he survive, he may come to realize isn’t so different from his dad after all.But first, he’s got to get out of these guts.
Having been gobbled up like a meal worm, Jay dredges up flashbacks of his father’s lectures in whale anatomy.Meanwhile,...