Whalefall Puts Austin Abrams Inside a Sperm Whale

A scuba diver is swallowed alive by a sperm whale and left with about an hour of air. That is the set-up for Whalefall, Disney’s undersea survival thriller that opens on Friday, Oct. 16 Variety.

The film is directed by Brian Duffield and adapted from Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel, which was a bestseller Variety. Duffield wrote the screenplay with Kraus The Hollywood Reporter. It runs 1 hour 46 minutes and is rated PG-13, which advises parents that some material may suit teenagers rather than younger children.

Austin Abrams plays Jay Gardiner. Josh Brolin plays Mitt Gardiner, Jay’s father The Hollywood Reporter. The cast also includes Elisabeth Shue as Zara, Jay’s mother, plus John Ortiz, Jane Levy as Eva and Emily Rudd as Nan.

The story starts on land. Jay returns home to Monterey, on the central California coast, for the one-year anniversary of his father’s death. Mitt died by suicide after mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lung, left him unable to dive. Jay decides to dive off Monastery Beach near Monterey to look for his father’s body.

The dive goes wrong fast. Jay becomes entangled in the tentacles of a giant squid. Then a squid-eating sperm whale takes both of them into its mouth Variety. Jay ends up trapped inside the animal’s stomach with roughly an hour’s worth of oxygen.

Much of the film stays inside the whale. Jay uses a jellyfish already eaten by the whale to light his way. The production gives the interior two distinct colours: a phosphorescent blue antechamber and a hellish red inner stomach cavity filled with dissolving acid.

Duffield has said the film is more than a straightforward monster movie Variety. The two leads arrive with recent horror history. Abrams and Brolin also co-star in Zach Cregger’s Weapons. Abrams also appears in Resident Evil.

For fans, this means a tight survival puzzle as much as a creature feature. One diver. One whale. One tank of air counting down.