If you would have told me last week that WHALEFALL would be one of the most emotionally resonant movies I had seen this year I would have accused you of suffering from nitrogen narcosis. The film borrows heavily from the biblical tale of Jonah and The Whale, but instead of Jonah fleeing to the sea to avoid spreading the word of God, Jay (Austin Abrams) flees to Ohio to avoid following in his father’s footsteps as an overbearing marine activist. When his father Mitt, played by a heavily tattooed Josh Brolin, chooses to end his suffering with mesothelioma by taking his own life, Jay begins his journey to repent for his absence in his father’s final days in the only way he knows how – by plumbing the depths of the ocean to search for his missing body. When Jay gets snatched up in the maw of a giant whale, he is forced to confront his tumultuous relationship with his father, and will discover that embracing the lessons he taught him in both diving and life may be the key to his salvation.
Despite my initial concerns that watching this movie might make me nervous about diving again, the gorgeous underwater cinematography had me itching to hop on a plane to catch the first boat I could find to the nearest coral reef. I appreciate that they took great pains to get the technical aspects of diving as accurate as possible, and I think that helped ground the more fantastical elements of the story. James Brolin and Austin Abrams really sold their contentious father/son dynamic, and Abrams proved once again that he can fully carry a movie when he is the only one onscreen for a large portion of it’s runtime. It’s a far more dramatic film than it appears given it’s wild premise, but as effective as many of the big sentimental moments in the film are, and I will admit to welling up on more than one occasion, I often found myself taken out of the moment by line deliveries that came off as humorous when I suspect they weren’t meant to be. This could be due to the fact that I just watched Abrams in Resident Evil where he also spent the majority of the film verbalizing his inner dialogue out loud for the benefit of the audience to great comedic effect. Some bits of exposition inside the whale felt like they were shoehorned in just to make sure the audience wasn’t left behind, which is a shame because when the film starts to weave his recollections of his father and his present predicament together, the audience can’t help but make the necessary connections without the need for extra hand holding.
I do feel a little bit bad for Austin Abrams though, because he is so good at playing a guy that gets absolutely put through the wringer that I predict we will see him placed in many more terrible circumstances in future films, which I will eagerly be seated for. Speaking of actors finding themselves playing similar roles, we have Jane Levy as Abrams’ sister. If I had a loonie for every time she was seen on a boat with her siblings grieving their dead father this festival season I’d have two loonies. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice. At least she seemed to have an easier time of it here than in the buzzy Midnight Madness hit RIVER. Overall, I think WHALEFALL is well worth checking out, especially if you want to understand how a movie about a dude stuck in a whale can have you going from cringing to crying in the amount of time it takes to to do a decompression stop.
Whalefall is currently in theatres.