‘Whalefall’ Trailer Provides A Terrifyingly Plausible Look At Being Trapped Inside A Whale
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20th Century Studios has released the first teaser for Whalefall, a survival thriller built around a fear most people would rather leave in the impossible pile: being swallowed alive by a sperm whale.
No, we’re not sitting in Sunday School learning about Jonah. The basic science is plausible, even if the odds are absurdly low.
Based on Daniel Kraus’ 2023 novel of the same name, Whalefall follows Jay Gardiner, played by Austin Abrams, a scuba diver who heads off the Central Coast of California in search of his late father’s remains. His father, Mitt Gardiner, is played by Josh Brolin, and his lessons from beyond his watery grave look set to become Jay’s best chance of survival.
But once you’re trapped inside a massive sperm whale, with only about an hour of oxygen and a very limited list of escape routes, survival is a little more complicated. You can’t just pull a Dory and start speaking whale to let you out. You’ll have to watch the movie when it arrives in October to see whether he can find his way out.
Could a Whale Actually Swallow You?
Directed by Brian Duffield, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Kraus, Whalefall sounds pretty ridiculous. Could a whale actually swallow a person whole? In most cases, probably not. Most whales in the ocean don’t have the anatomy for that kind of meal. A sperm whale, however – the same kind of whale that Captain Ahab hunted in Moby-Dick – is the exception.
Sperm whales are toothed whales that hunt large prey, including squid, and they don’t chew their food in the way humans might imagine. They swallow prey whole. And Whalefall takes that horrible possibility and turns it into thalassophobia with teeth.
While speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Duffield said the team worked with whale experts to make the film as scientifically accurate as possible. Though they did have to stop short of performing an endoscopy of a sperm whale, “for obvious size and logistical reasons.”
“But based on everything we’ve learned,” said Duffield, “there’s a lot of science in the movie,” alongside a few liberties required to make a survival thriller about a bloke trapped inside a whale.
“And I’m so sorry for people that are going to be scared about that,” he said.
But here’s the really scary bit. If the story followed the science all the way down, Jay’s best-case escape plan would probably disappear with the whale. A whale fall is what happens when a dead whale sinks to the seafloor and becomes a concentrated food source for deep-sea life.
Whalefall is scheduled to hit Australian cinemas on 15 October 2026. Alongside Abrams and Brolin, Whalefall stars Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy and Emily Rudd. It also marks Duffield’s first major theatrical release as a director after Spontaneous and No One Will Save You, and judging by the early footage, he’s not wasting the big screen on anything small. If you thought Jaws was scary, just you wait.
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