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. 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. 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.” 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. 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.
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