Whalefall is now in theaters. Based on the novel by Daniel Kraus (Angel Down), who also co-wrote the screenplay with director Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You, Cocaine Bear), Whalefall is about a scuba diver (Austin Abrams) looking for the remains of his father (Josh Brolin) in the Pacific Ocean. However, while he’s on his expedition, he gets swallowed by an enormous sperm whale. With only an hour’s worth of oxygen, he must free himself from inside the whale.
While at New York Comic Con 2026, a week before the film’s release, Polygon caught up with stars Josh Brolin and Austin Abrams, as well as Kraus and Duffield, to talk about the biggest challenges of bringing this book to the big screen, as well as what the movie is really about.
The most challenging scene
According to Kraus, the toughest part of the inside-the-whale experience was bringing to life the stomach of the whale — or, more accurately, the first stomach, as sperm whale stomachs consist of four separate chambers.
Kraus tells Polygon:
“In the book, everything was equally difficult because I’m not a whale scientist. I was learning from the whale scientists and biologists and diving experts and trying to visualize it, looking at pictures and dissected parts, trying to figure this out. As difficult as that was, it’s much more difficult in the movie. I can obscure things in the writing, but in the movie, you have to build it and it all has to be there. That’s where Ramsey Avery came in, the production designer. As much as I thought I knew about whales, pretty soon he had overtaken me with all these incredible visual studies of what things really look like. The biggest challenge was the main stomach — stomach number one — because it has to do everything. It has to chew, it has to roll over, it has to incline, it has to be filled with liquid and water and animals and jellyfish and squid. As a set, it’s a huge problem. How do you build something that can do all that? And it’s living and it’s soft and it has bioluminescent lighting. It’s so much to ask of a set.”
Austin Abrams, who stars in Whalefall as diver Jay Gardiner, pointed to the same scene as the most difficult, saying the hardest part of the film was “the compression, being squeezed.”
The whale isn’t the villain
As much as the movie is about a guy getting swallowed by a whale, neither Kraus nor Duffield ever saw the whale as the film’s villain.
Here’s Kraus again:
“The whale was never a being of fear or intimidation. It was always a figure of awe and majesty. As soon as you start researching whales, particularly sperm whales, they are the most bizarre, magical, mystical, strange beings that I almost saw as gods, being angelic and so intelligent. There are so many reports of them helping people in distress. They’re just these incredible creatures, so it’s more of a sense of, ‘this thing is so big that it doesn’t even know we exist’ in the way that God may just not even notice the ants of humanity.”
Duffield echoes the sentiment:
“Everyone involved loves whales. We approached it with a lot of love and respect. It’s the most innocent character in the movie. It’s just living its life and I think, by the end of the movie, you really view it as a hero of some sorts.”
It’s not really about the whale
The heart of Whalefall is the father and the relationship between Abrams’ character and Brolin’s. While there is a claustrophobic, ticking-clock excitement to the film which seeks to immerse the viewer in the actual experience of getting swallowed by a whale, that’s only part of it. The character’s actual emotional journey isn’t just about whale anatomy. It’s about Jay reaching some sense of peace with the difficult relationship he had with his dad.
As Brolin puts it: “Whales are a symbol in this movie, to get you to a place where you get out of your own way.”
Whalefall is now in theaters.