Whalefall (Brian Duffield, 2026)

Brian Duffield has amassed a career writing and directing films using genre conceits as the doorway to some of the most difficult of human emotional states and experiences, without them being grueling or punishing. Along with a lengthy resumé as a screenwriter, Duffield directed Spontaneous, and No One Will Save You, and both found moderate sized audiences that appreciated his ability to see genre films as that doorway.

Whalefall is an adaptation of a Daniel Krauss novel. Last year, Krauss won a Pulitzer Prize for literature with his novel Angel Down. Maybe the best way to describe Krauss as a writer is to say he specializes in finding the poetry in genre, mining it for deeply affecting emotional narratives about the human condition. They aren't strictly genre novels, but they also aren't not genre novels either. It's an interesting balance that's hard to achieve, and it may be what could be considered Krauss's signature style.

The announcement that Duffield was going to be adapting Whalefall for the screen seemed like a perfect union of sensibilities between novelist and writer/director charged with bringing their work to the screen.

I will confess, Whalefall and Angel Down are both still in my "to be read pile," so I can't say how closely Duffield's film follows its source material, but I don't generally find that an interesting discussion anyway. Whalefall's popularity and reputation speak for themselves, where the novel is concerned. The question here is, "Does Whalefall, the film, work on its own?"

Like so many genre stories or stories flirting with genre (as I'd say Whalefall is), the premise sounds absurd. A college aged man gets swallowed by a whale, and struggles to survive. This, of course, calls back to the same scenario in Pinocchio. It's easy to see why Krauss chose that particular piece of ephemera from the cultural consciousness for this story. At least in this film version, Austin Abrams character, Jay Gardiner, isn't trying to become a real boy, but he is trying to find his way to adulthood, manhood most especially, in the shadow of a difficult relationship with his deceased father. Whalefall is about the process many people experience of having a difficult relationship with a parent, making our way through the anger and hurt to the understanding that our parents are flawed human beings, while simultaneously recognizing their mistakes may have been real and hurtful, while they attempting to do the best they could, and being able to embrace what they've taught us that helps us become better versions of ourselves as adults.

To say how the film does this would be to spoil the journey, and the journey is the thing here.

Duffield successfully takes this improbable premise, as absurd as it may sound, and turns into an hour and forty-five minute exercise in suspense and catharsis. As he demonstrated in Spontaneous, he understands how to craft a narrative weaving through an emotional journey, that feels coherent and has impact. In No One Will Save You, he demonstrated his ability to craft suspenseful sequences using the environment in a deft, inventive way. Whalefall brings those skills together, and with strong performances from Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin (playing his father, Mitt Gardiner) and supporting cast Elizabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy, and Emily Rudd all contributing admirably, it becomes a surprisingly affecting movie.

If you can't tell, I was dubious about this working as a movie. A novel has more room to encourage a reader to get on board with a premise like this. It also doesn't have to deal with the fact of physics needing to look and feel real on screen. Whalefall succeeds in getting the viewer on board through sheer confidence. That confidence is earned though, because Duffield marries disparate visual styles by using left of center editing techniques to create a visual language that feels whole, while communicating what the audience needs to understand about what those visual styles represent. There's an approach to bringing the audience into Jay Gardiner's perspective that feels lifted from a more avant garde history in movies, but its integrated so well, it never has the self consciousness of so many of the movies in that history. It's not showing off. It's not experimenting as confrontation. It's just the best way to be able to tell this story.

In the age of streaming, when so many of the films being created for streaming services, it feels like a breath of fresh air for a film not to beg an audience to get on board, but to assume that if they're in the theater, they're not looking for an out. Duffield is confident in the story he has to tell, how he's going to tell it, and he had every right to be. This is engaging, compelling movie making, that isn't interested in begging you not to switch to another streamer. Whalefall comes more from the perspective that you've bought your ticket, and you deserve an engaging movie.

I walked out of Whalefall feeling it was a reminder of one of the things I love about movies. It is getting at something close to universal, and it's doing so by turning the language of popular moviemaking into its own individual poetry that's clearly inspired by the history of the medium. That poetry just happens to use some of the vocabulary one finds in a genre dialect.

One of the other things stands out most is that the visual effects achieve a kind of elegant beauty. There has been a tendency for some time for scenes or particular shots involving visual effects to be so busy, so crammed full, it seems like the point is to overwhelm the viewer to the point that sense of being overwhelmed might override the understanding that they are visual effects. Here, Duffield uses the visual effects to produce some genuinely beautiful underwater imagery, and part of their beauty is their simplicity. Again, there's a confidence in this that pays off. He moves between fastidious close ups of this whale that do feel real in the texture, physics and scope, and wide shots where he opts for a simplicity that produces some images with a simple, painterly elegance and beauty. The visual effects in Whalefall "look good," by two different definitions, depending on which kind of shot it is. So often, the striving for realism is so urgent, either directors of visual effects departments seem to forget to ask if the image on screen is visually appealing. Duffield and his visual effects teams, understand this. It helps to create Whalefall feel grounded, while also allowing it to have the poetic nature that makes it unique and particular.

To see something like this so well executed, when so many much more straight forward, easy to swallow (pun intended) premises get so badly botched, is impressive on its own. I don't know that Whalefall will necessarily be a movie I will often revisit, but its definitely one I admire and would recommend.