Sea beast smorgasbord – whale, squid, orcas. Even the tinier specimens like a jellyfish and a sea urchin have their own vicious defences. A whale of a ride though without an anatomy book to hand I’d be hard put to tell you what’s going on. A big-budget B-picture, heavy on the thrills and edge-of-the-seat tension but suffers from the need to put on airs and graces and lecture us on ecology and the final piece of mumbo-jumbo lacks the satisfying clarity of, say, Ryan Gosling’s scientific explanations in Project Hail Mary (2026).
After a terrific hour of immersion in the belly of the whale, which involves tangling with the aforementioned squid and sea urchin and being sucked into the hard-core digestive part of the mammal, the ending suddenly switches to the maudlin, with our hero being given advice by his dead father and somehow, apparently, communing with the whale. And it’s okay, also apparently, to blow a whale to smithereens because in ecological terms a dead whale provides a mountain of nutrients for other sea creatures and whatever grows on the seabed in what is known as a “whalefall.”
But until then it’s pure pedal-to-the-metal. For reasons that don’t make much sense college student Jay (Austin Abrams) decides to go hunting for his father’s remains, even though they had a very difficult relationship, a year after Mitt (Josh Brolin) committed suicide by dropping into the sea with the metal equivalent of a block of cement attached. Kitted out in scuba gear, Jay no sooner has reached the trench where he reckons his dad fell than he gets snagged by a squid whose tentacles are sticking out of the mouth of a sperm whale and he’s dragged inside.
Turns out, if I’m reading this right, a whale has two stomach sections, the first where his prey just sit like in a waiting room, and the second where the prey is consumed into the digestion system. So landing initially in the first section, the squid decides he might as well enjoy a bit of lunch before he meets his maker. Jay is almost crushed to death and the squid it transpires also has a very small mouth with very sharp teeth.
He only escapes because the squid is the first to be swallowed into the digestive system. But Jay is next and the most of his time battling for a way out of the maze of the whale’s stomach. There’s virtually no dialog, obviously, and mostly all Jay can do is scream and gasp for breath and watch as his oxygen supply runs down. He nearly escapes through the whale’s mouth as it surfaces for air and to provide tourists with the opportunity for selfies but soon slithers back down.
The whale, it turns out, is not entirely immune. While its size might deter smaller mammals it has little defense against a shoal of ravenous orcas which take chunks out its tail and body. There’s some hocus pocus that I couldn’t get a handle on that permitted Jay to make his escape, some kind of chemical lesson that created an explosion.
I could have done without the father-son relationship because it became too much a part of the later narrative. It didn’t matter how Jay ended up in the whale’s stomach, to be honest, and, as I said, we didn’t need pontificating about ocean ecology.
But the central section, the trap, is terrific. Unusually, Austin Adams, as he proved in Resident Evil (2026), can carry a film where he’s the entire narrative conduit and there’s not much interaction between characters, much of the picture relying on his reactions to a given situation. Josh Brolin (Weapons, 2025) seems to have inherited all those grizzled old guy roles that used to fall to the likes of Nick Nolte. I haven’t seen Elizabeth Shue (she was Oscar-nominated for Leaving Las Vegas, 1995) in a long time. This is her first movie in three years and the last one I remembered her in was the Death Wish (2018) remake.
Directed by Brian Duffield (Cocaine Bear, 2023) who wrote the screenplay with Daniel Kraus, author of the source novel.
I tell you I was on the edge of my seat all the time Jay was in the belly of the beast, but, unfortunately the tension dissipated once he started imagining his dead father giving him instruction.
