Whalefall: scuba diver vs. sperm whale guts, in theaters October 16

Whalefall opens in theaters October 16, bringing one of the strangest survival stories in recent memory to the screen. It's adapted from Daniel Kraus' 2023 novel, and the pitch is as simple as it is nuts: a scuba diver gets swallowed whole by a sperm whale and has to claw his way out from the inside.

Austin Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, a young man diving off the California coast searching for his father's remains. A year earlier, his dad Mitt—played by Josh Brolin—jumped off his tour boat with weights strapped on, ending his life after a mesothelioma diagnosis. Jay's out there looking for closure when he runs into a giant squid, then gets gulped down by the whale hunting it.

The rest of the movie plays out in real time inside the whale's body while Jay flashes back to his complicated relationship with Mitt. Brian Duffield directed and co-wrote the script with Kraus. Duffield made Spontaneous and No One Will Save You, so he knows how to handle high-concept weird, and reports say he leans hard into the body-horror survival angle here.

Brolin and Abrams anchor the cast. Jane Levy, John Ortiz, Emily Rudd and Elisabeth Shue round out the ensemble. Abrams is also in the new Resident Evil film, so he's having a busy stretch getting chased by monsters.

The split

Reviewers can't agree on whether this thing works. Some call the survival scenes tense and inventive, praising the way Duffield uses the whale's anatomy as a nightmare obstacle course. The father-son flashbacks are where opinions diverge: some say they give the story emotional weight, others say they're jarring and repetitive, breaking up the claustrophobia every time you start to feel it.

One outlet compared it to a masterpiece and called it miraculous. Another said it's doomed to sink at the box office. The common ground is that it's ambitious, Abrams and Brolin commit, and the premise is unlike anything else in theaters right now.

If you want a survival thriller that swings for something different and don't mind a heavy dose of family drama mixed into the body horror, Whalefall is worth the ticket. If you just want to watch a guy fight his way out of a whale without stopping for feelings, you might leave wishing Duffield had picked a lane.