Whalefall

 

Director Brian Duffield's Whalefall is a cerebral, low-concept film trapped inside an actiony, high-concept picture.

This is to say the underwater entrapment thriller is about much more than how the hero Jay (the intrepid Prince of Peril Austin Adams) escapes (or doesn't) from the guts of a sperm whale, before his air runs out.

Duffield, working with Daniel Kraus from Kraus's book, delivers the mechanics of surviving the unthinkable, while also offering a thoughtful reflection on college boy Jay's estrangement from his monomaniacally controlling diving instructor father, Mitt (King of Chaos Josh Brolin), and the events leading up to Mitt's death and to young Jay's dive into coastal waters near a chasm where his father disappeared.

Duffield intersperses scenes of Jay fighting against being digested along with a clingy giant squid with those of Mitt's derisive instruction to his son about aquatic life and valuable lessons lurking beneath the waves. As audiences might expect, those lessons will be tested the longer "Jonah" remains in the whale's belly.

Much of the film's weight rests on Adams, who moviegoers recently saw in the latest entry in the apocalyptic Resident Evil game and picture juggernaut. Reports are that Adams performed all of the contorting stunts himself, which is quite impressive. He's also a steady presence in the homestead scenes with Elizabeth Shue as his mother, Zara, and Jane Levy and Emily Rudd as his sisters, Eva and Nan, even though those sequences felt underwritten and a little static when compared with the father-son exchanges between Adams and Brolin.

Despite a little bit of sputtering while on dry land, Whalefall is a satisfying thrill-ride about the nightmare of confinement -- all kinds -- and the things we will do to get free.