Whalefall

In this film, the way to a father’s heart lies literally through a whale’s stomach. Literally. As if Austin Abrams wasn’t put through enough hell in the recent Resident Evil, he returns for Whalefall, adapted from a book, where he spends 90% of the time being tossed around in the belly of a beast which is a sperm whale. It’s an ambitious project for sure, and director Brian Duffield is seriously committed to it, not giving us a break from all that could lie in that giant mammal’s insides, from digestive acids to the remains of things swallowed up by it, to a lot of other floating and hanging stuff that it’s best left to one’s imagination. What it boils down to is Abrams’s Jay being squeezed multiple times between sinewy, slithering, throbbing walls and – you guessed it right – surviving.