When, a couple of years ago, Daniel Kraus wrote his thriller Whalefall, he built the book around an extraordinary premise connected to the strange phenomenon of the title. After a whale dies, its corpse sinks to the bottom of the ocean and forms a new ecosystem, sustaining scavengers, crustaceans and hundreds of deep-sea organisms for many years – decades, in some instances.
In Kraus’s story a 17-year-old scuba diver, Jay Gardiner, is searching the Pacific off California for the remains of his father, a well-known local diver who, in the late stages of cancer, died by suicide. When a giant squid draws Jay into the mouth of a sperm whale, the teenager finds himself inside its stomach with dwindling oxygen and an hour to escape.
As the page-turner races against that deadline, Jay must confront the guilt, anger and unresolved love that shaped his relationship with his father.
A marriage of maritime science, grief meditation, and claustrophobic suspense, Kraus’s adventure earned some rave reviews after it was published in 2023. The New York Times called it “a crazy, and crazily enjoyable, beat-the-clock adventure story about fathers, sons, guilt and the mysteries of the sea”.
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So the studio bidding war to win the film distribution rights was no surprise.
The new movie stars Josh Brolin as Mitt, the swallowed diver’s father. The actor read the book while he was shooting Ridley Scott’s film The Dog Stars. He loved it so much that he slowed down, because he didn’t want it to end. The Whalefall story also made him sob, he says, and ultimately prompted him to talk to his own son and father – the actor James Brolin – about their respective relationships.
“I had a massive emotional reaction to the end of that book,” Brolin says. “I’m still trying to figure that out. It took no time – zero time – to say yes to the script. All the elements with the father and the son drew me in.
“Reading it was just something. I knew that I’d never seen anything like it before. And that was a really exciting prospect. You’re reading something and thinking, I don’t know how we’re going to do this.”
Kraus drew the outlandish survival premise from real-world accounts by kayakers and scuba divers who briefly ended up in the mouths of humpback whales.
He and the film’s director, Brian Duffield, also consulted scientists, including Prof Lara Horstmann, director of marine science at the University of Alaska, and Phil Clapham of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, in Seattle, who advised on every behavioural – and sometimes intestinal – detail.
“I now know where everything is in a whale,” says Austin Abrams, the breakout star of the recent horror films Weapons and Resident Evil, who plays Jay. Be warned: there will be gigantic innards and lakes of acid. Do not bring popcorn to this movie.
As time runs out for the adolescent hero, who has been drawing on Mitt’s salty ingenuity to engineer routes to survival, memories of their turbulent relationship resurface until finally, with oxygen reserves contracting, whale and father speak with one voice. To amplify that point, the whale’s heartbeat is actually Brolin’s.
Something like therapy crept into rehearsals.
“I was in a place in my life where I just wanted to go deeper,” Brolin says. “Can you have a more joyful experience during this process, especially in a movie that is as emotionally difficult as this is? I had an amazing time. During rehearsals we would improvise; we would talk about our families.
“Selfishly, that’s the only reason why you do this. It’s because you’re interested in the human condition and how you fit in – and how you’ve navigated your own raising of your own children,” he says.
“That’s the only way you can sustain this after 42 years of doing this job. You have to have an organic interest in what makes us tick.”
Abrams had already scored a number of hit television shows, including The Walking Dead, This Is Us and Euphoria, before breaking into movies. The star of Paper Towns and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark won considerable plaudits in 2024, when he held his own alongside Brad Pitt and George Clooney in the glossy thriller Wolfs.
“There’s jitters of working with Brad and George,” he says. “Doubt is definitely something you contend with.”
Before he began filming Whalefall, the 30-year-old actor spent time with sperm whales, the only mammal big enough to swallow a human whole. He scuba-dived alongside them off Dominica, to observe their behaviour in their natural habitat, with Patrick Dykstra, who won a Bafta for his filming of sperm whales for the David Attenborough series Blue Planet II.
Abrams also obtained advanced scuba certification and built his endurance by walking around his neighbourhood in full diving gear.
The training prepared him for the film’s demanding underwater sequences in the Pacific Ocean, where physical stamina and familiarity with diving equipment were essential.
“Diving wasn’t necessarily something I was super comfortable with,” he says. “That was a really important aspect of the discussion. The character needed to be this guy who has been doing it his whole life, so we needed to make it feel and look like that.
“And then there’s also the stunt aspect, where you’re doing all these things with lines, and people are pulling you and twisting you. You have to be as comfortable as you can down there. Learning all that stuff was a really important aspect of it.”
Re-creating the inside of a whale demanded more from the film-makers than computer-generated imagery. Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop, the Oscar-winning New Zealand effects studio that worked on the Lord of the Rings sequence, created physical sets that make Jay’s predicament particularly nauseous.
The 360-degree stomach set could be rolled, while water was added and drained to alter its contours, approximating the visceral sensation of being trapped in a living, shifting organism. Freaky bioluminescent details provide crucial flashes of light in the darkness.
“I’ve got to say, after seeing a sperm whale, the first thing that comes to mind is: do we even need to sell a fictional story about whales?” Abrams says. “They’re such magical animals in themselves.”
“I agree with Austin,” Brolin says. “They’re incredible animals, and I feel like that’s partly why we keep coming back to whales in mythic stories. There are so many stories about them, and each of them is really affecting.”
Whales have long occupied a space in our collective imagination. In Norse mythology, the sea could conceal monstrous creatures, while Maori tradition reveres whales as ancestral guardians.
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In the Book of Jonah, in the Old Testament, the prophet must spend three days praying and repenting inside the belly of a whale, having disobeyed God’s command for the population of Nineveh to repent.
The immortal Moby-Dick has been variously interpreted as an allegory of humanity’s futile struggle to impose order on an indifferent universe, a Marxist critique of industrial exploitation, an ecofable and a warning about authoritarian leadership.
Whalefall perhaps stands out nevertheless: death by gigantic sea beast has rarely seemed as simultaneously revolting and sorrowful a prospect. But the mystique remains.
“There’s a magical quality to whales,” Brolin says. “I think that’s probably why we love telling stories about them.”
Whalefall is in cinemas from Friday, October 16th
