Review: ‘Whalefall’ is a tense survival story with guts, teeth and daddy issues that get a bit gooey

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, the film works to wring out a tear, occasionally squeezing too hard, but earning several sad sighs of recognition.

Set off the California coast near Monterey Bay, “Whalefall” is shot by Aaron Morton to look realistic. This Pacific Ocean is the true one: silty, cold, gray and hostile. As Jay waddles into the water, the waves seem to want to shove the reedy young man back to shore. Once he’s managed to hurl himself past the surf to rest atop an underwater cliff, the darkness below is as scary as if we’d regressed into primordial prey.

The whale attack is a tragedy of happenstance and filmed as chaotically as if it were happening to the camera. It’d be nice to see more of it, but at least we feel the visceral terror of a whammy of sonar, a lashing from its muscular tongue and the velocity that hurls Jay from the mouth to the throat, then squashes him into its stomach.

There’s seat-shaking violence in how the whale breaches the surface and slams its weight back down (the crafty sound design is by James Miller) and body horror in its claustrophobic, spongy inner chambers. Which wet hole is the way out — and which leads to a pool of skin-melting digestive acid? Sure, in space no one can hear you scream. But underwater, we grit our teeth at Jay’s every fluttering breath.

I read “Whalefall” when it was first published and couldn’t imagine how the book could be turned into a film. Everything seemed against it, from the heavy narration to the creature’s dark insides and the lead’s isolated gloom. At least “127 Hours” had lovely shots of Utah.

Some challenges are fixable. The whale’s gullet is flickeringly lit by a bioluminescent jellyfish that Jay sort of befriends. To the film’s credit, every animal acts like it has as much right to exist as this out-of-his-ecosystem human. An aggressive squid is so angry to be eaten that it made me regret sampling live sashimi in Koreatown.

Other pitfalls just have to be forgiven, like when Abrams has to explain how he’s feeling with an air hose between his teeth. The script wisely cuts back on some of the book’s cuteness, only sparingly making Jay refer to a makeshift tool by its pet name, “Beaky.” Still, he’s compelled to say something every so often and each time we want to scream that he’s wasting his precious oxygen. A couple seemingly significant lines of dialogue come out garbled through the mouthpiece. I say seemingly because I honestly couldn’t tell you what they were, but the tenor felt important.

Abrams is well-cast in the role, not only because last month’s “Resident Evil” proved he can hold the screen pretty much by himself. Though he began acting as a teenager with stints on “The Walking Dead” and “Euphoria” and continues to get cast as characters younger than he is, he’s never had that overly polished child-performer charm. Instead, he comes across as scruffy and vulnerable — even as the spooked junkie in “Weapons,” in which he seemed to mimic a cartoon cat. Check him out alongside Ben Stiller in Mike White’s underseen 2017 anxiety dramedy “Brad’s Status” if you haven’t, and you may sense what I did: a precocious talent biding his time until his roles grew up. This fall feels like his graduation party.

Given the compressed running time, the film has more memories of Mitt appearing practical and wise than of being a bastard. To make that point, it leans on one awful boat trip scene that starts with Mitt smashing a beer can on his forehead until it bleeds. We get more shivers from a glimpse of a very young Jay nervously calling his father “Sir” than we do from Brolin barking caricature-style that “There’s more to existence than fun!” Occasionally, the blunt-headed whale seems to resemble Brolin himself.

I’m writing this on what would have been my dad’s birthday, a kind man who passed away when I was roughly Jay’s age. He was no Mitt and I don’t believe in ghosts. Nevertheless, I, too, am aware of my father’s voice. Sometimes our rational understanding of life and death bumps into a seemingly impossible presence. That’s the big idea churning under “Whalefall’s” surface.