Whalefall

Based on a novel by Daniel Kraus, this bananas-sounding but sweatily effective survival thriller sees Resident Evil and Weapons’ disaster-magnet Austin Abrams facing his most luckless scenario yet: getting interned within the belly of a sperm whale. Replete with flesh-burning digestive juices and oozing gunk, it’s the kind of noxious environment that would put even HP Lovecraft off his dinner. And it’s a 4DX screening that only the truly bold will want to book in for. 

Abrams is Jay Gardiner, a twentysomething Californian who has decamped to the Midwest, mainly to avoid his dad Mitt (Josh Brolin giving his best Nick Nolte), an alpha type who seems to love the ocean a lot more than his son. The movie opens with the terminally ill Mitt committing himself to the deep, off his favourite beach. But Jay, his mum (Elisabeth Shue) and older sisters (Jane Levy, Emily Rudd) won’t find peace without a body to bury. With something still to prove to his old man, the scuba-diving Jay tanks-up and slips beneath the waves to find him. 

Accepting that no marine biologist is going to stand what happens next, director Brian Duffield (No One Will Save You) still manages to make the moment of truth convincing – with the help of some inky depths and a giant squid that the whale is pursuing. By the time Abrams’ panicking Jay wraps his head around his Jonah-esque predicament, the oxygen in his tank is already beginning to run out and the clock starts ticking.

Claustrophobics are going to need a bag to breathe into

Unlike one-location counterparts like Buried and Locke, this isn’t of those thrillers where you wonder how the director will keep, say, the inside of a coffin or a car interesting for 90 minutes. But the cutaways and flashbacks are a much needed circuit-break. The blubbery interiors are a claustrophobic hellscape where Jay’s terror is intercut with his desperate efforts to find a way out. An ill-advised visit to the whale’s digestive tract takes the film into realms of full-blown body horror. It’s stressful to be stuck in there with him, although claustrophobics are going to need a bag to breathe into.

Mitt, while mostly useless in other areas of parenting, has left his son a series of oddly specific whale-escaping tips delivered via father-and-son flashbacks. There’s some cod spirituality that evokes the more ponderous bits in an Avatar movie. But grumbling about convenient plot details in a movie in which a man is stuck inside a 30-tonne mammal feels like nitpicking. Your move, Jaws.

In cinemas worldwide Fri Oct 16.