Whalefall is the most disgusting tearjerker you'll see this year

Austin Abrams' ocean survival thriller pulls no punches with its grimly visceral premise.

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Whalefall, now in theaters.

For the past few months, Austin Abrams has been moaning and groaning in some of the worst situations imaginable. First, as Brian Hodukovich's medical courier in Resident Evil, he had to fight off an onslaught of mutant zombie monsters. Now, as Jay Gardiner in Whalefall, he spends most of the film's 106-minute running time repeatedly mutilating the interior of an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale.

Whalefall is directed by Brian Duffield (Nobody's Gonna Save You, Spontaneous) and co-written by Daniel Krauss (author of the bestselling 2023 novel on which the film is based). A legendary local diver who became seriously ill with advanced and terminal mesothelioma. The opening scene of the film shows him placing sealed obituaries for his wife and three children in a cooler on his boat before taking his own life by strapping on scuba weights and jumping into the ocean. A year later, Jay has not yet opened his letter when he is swallowed by a huge whale hunting a giant squid in the same waters.

With only an hour of oxygen left in his scuba tank, Jay must endure a series of increasingly painful ordeals as he searches for a way to escape his terrifying predicament. There's a nasty encounter with a giant squid's razor-sharp beak, exposure to corrosive stomach acid, and the constant threat of being crushed by the whale's convulsing limbs or suffocating on the poisonous, unbreathable methane gas inside his body. Amidst the membrane horror of Jay being swallowed, we learn more about his complicated relationship with Mitt, a violent and often emotionally abusive man, through a series of flashbacks.

Eventually, the whale breaks through to the surface and Jay almost manages to free himself by climbing up through its open mouth. But he ends up rolling back inside the whale as it dives deep into the ocean, causing Jay's eardrums to burst and him hallucinating from lack of oxygen and panic. It is then that Jay, believing that he is probably dying, begins to hear his late father's voice speaking to him through the whale. As the whale is attacked by orcas, rescued by its pod, and returned to the surface, Jay is forced to process his trauma, deal with the guilt and grief he feels for not meeting his father before he died, and come to the realization that the only way he wants to survive is to use the grueling diving lessons that drill his son into his current position.

"The whole story is based on his relationship with his father, and because of his father's personality and the way he does it, he can't accept what his father is trying to pass on to him," Brolin told Direct of Whalefall's overarching message. "And I think the whale is a symbol of how we go out of our way to inhale the gems that we need, because I think the father really wants him to be self-sufficient, and he does it in a way that's almost paranoid. So the boy can't hear it, and then when the boy needs it, you see that he heard it. He just didn't hear it the way [his father] wanted him to, and by the way, I he I don't blame him."

Eventually, Jay is able to escape the whale, which has already succumbed to the orca's injuries, by blowing it up from the inside. It's all overly awkward and obviously a little ridiculous, but if you can overlook the absurdity of the premise and some particularly vague lines of dialogue, then you might get a feel for what unconditional love means. As the Whale Mate version somberly reminds Jay, "a whale is forever."