Whalefall

The opportunities for a wise-ass opening line are many. But I think it’s safe to say that this is the best (non-biblical) movie you will see this year (or ever) about a man swallowed by a whale.

This is what happens to a young fellow (Austin Abrams) while scuba diving in search of his late father’s remains. He survives the sperm whale’s initial pointy-toothed slurp-up but has only an hour’s worth of air left.

It doesn’t help at all that he’s in that room-sized and very slimy esophagus with an equally surprised and understandably pissed-off giant squid. The squid’s there to provide a few extra tentacle-related scares before unwillingly helping to demonstrate the next digestive phase. Before you ask: light is supplied by bioluminescent jellyfish and such.

Okay, enough with the Jonah jokes. It’s faint praise, but this weird little flick by Brian Duffield (who I believe was arrested by the bad taste police for producing Cocaine Bear) could be leagues worse. There’s a genuinely emotional back story, Elizabeth Shue does well in what amounts to a cameo, and the ever-watchable Josh Brolin adds gravitas.

Implausible though it may be, it’s pretty well made and grounded in universal father-son dynamics. This visceral, bold and brutal oddity plays deeply on our primal fears. It’s unthinkably terrifying and a little too sentimental, and yet somehow comes off as confident and earnest, even cathartic.

Fun fact: “Whalefall” is what happens when the “carcass of a dead whale falls to the ocean floor, creating a rich, localized ecosystem that can sustain hundreds of marine species for decades.” Now you know. (106 min)