A Survival Thriller That Finds Its Heart in a Father and Son

Let’s get the pitch out of the way, because it’s a good one: a scuba diver is swallowed whole by a sperm whale and has exactly one hour of oxygen to claw, talk, or improvise his way out. 

The studio has been selling it as The Martian meets 127 Hours, which is a bold thing to say about a film whose main location is a stomach. 

Director Brian Duffield, who co-wrote the script with Daniel Kraus from Kraus’s 2023 novel, clearly knows his way around a thriller with one merciless rule. And yet I came away having experienced Whalefall as an average survivalist tale that proves far more compelling as a story of reconciliation and understanding between a father and son. 

I did not expect to be writing that sentence about a film with a whale in it. I’m as surprised as you are.

Jay, played by Austin Abrams, goes diving off the central California coast in search of his father’s remains, a mission that already arrives pre-loaded with emotional baggage, and is promptly swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale.

Credit where it’s due: once he’s inside, the film doesn’t play nice. There are moments of genuine brutality and despair, the kind that make you shift in your seat and quietly reconsider your hobbies.

The trouble starts when the ordeal keeps going. Survival films run on a simple contract: I’ll believe you can get out of this if you let me believe every step was possible. Whalefall renegotiates that contract at regular intervals. The further Jay gets, the more the premise feels stretched, and the more the film plays like sci-fi, or, as I’ve taken to calling it, “bio-fi”, rather than a plausible fight to stay alive.

Set it beside 127 Hours, and the gap shows. Danny Boyle’s film had the horrible advantage of being true: Aron Ralston, a rock, and a very short list of options. It never had to beg for my faith, because reality had already signed off. 

Whalefall keeps asking for a little more faith, and mine, like Jay’s oxygen, turned out to be a finite resource.

Which brings me to the length. Jay has an hour on the clock, and the film seems determined to make us feel every minute of it. 

A ticking air supply should tighten the screws; instead, the stretch inside the whale runs long enough that the tension goes slack, like a tow rope nobody remembered to pull. A leaner ordeal, one that trusted us to fill in the gaps, would have hit much harder. It’s a survival film that kept adding scenes after it had already made its point.

Then there’s Josh Brolin as Mitt Gardiner, a hardened seaman who looks like he was assembled from rope, ink, and a lifelong suspicion of landlubbers. 

Tattooed and built like an old-school sailor, he is Robert Shaw’s Quint from Jaws, if Quint had been issued a single trait and told to commit. 

I kept waiting for him to mutter something about a bigger boat. 

Quint, of course, had his USS Indianapolis monologue, the one quiet scene where the bluster cracks and you glimpse the wound underneath. Mitt gets no such scene. He is single-mindedly devoted to teaching his son the glory and the secrets of the sea, and that is the character. I admire the commitment, sincerely. I just wanted a second dimension to go with it.

And yet, and this is the part that surprised me, that one-note dad is the best thing in the movie. The father-son dynamic gives Whalefall its stronger emotional current. 

The sea is the only inheritance Mitt knows how to hand over, and the film is at its most affecting when Jay’s predicament becomes a test of what that gift was worth, and whether two people who loved each other ever learned to speak the same language. 

There is something genuinely touching about a man who can only say what he feels by teaching you to read the water.

But the characters never quite gain the depth the story needs. Jay and Mitt are drawn in outline, and the film leans hard on a reconciliation it hasn’t fully built the foundations for. 

We understand what they represent better than who they are. 

Give me one specific, petty, human disagreement between these two, something unresolved that has nothing to do with the ocean, and the ending could have flattened me instead of merely moving me.

So here is where I land. 

Whalefall has a fine central idea and some harrowing moments, but it is held back by thin characterisation and a stretch inside the whale that overstays its welcome. As a fight to escape, it’s serviceable. 

As a story of two people trying to understand each other across a lifetime of salt water, it’s quietly better than it has any right to be. 

Ultimately, Whalefall remains an average survival film, more memorable for its father-son reconciliation than for its fight to escape. 

I’ll remember the dad. The whale can find its own publicist.

Showing in cinemas from Friday, 16 October 2026.

-Dirk Lombard Fourie