This Insane New Movie Takes Place Inside a Whale—For Real

20th Century Studios From Lifeboat to Buried , movies have often derived skin-crawling suspense from claustrophobia, and few have ever been as crazily suffocating as Whalefall , in which scuba diver Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) winds up literally trapped in—and forced to fight his way out of—the belly of an aquatic beast.

A biblical calamity that plays out in giddily squishy and stifling fashion, Brian Duffield’s film (October 16) is all about inducing intense squirms, and on that basis, it proves amusing genre pulp.

Unfortunately, not content to deliver thrills alone, it also piles on sad-dad melodrama, causing its later passages to turn soggy in all the wrong ways.

While the Old Testament’s Jonah spent three long days praying and repenting in a whale’s stomach, Jay’s experience in Whalefall ’s central location is considerably shorter and more traumatic.

Before it gets down to business, however, the film (October 16, in theaters)—an adaptation of Daniel Kraus’ best-selling novel—picks up with the character as he returns to his childhood home after his dad Mitt’s (James Brolin) passing.

Jay and Mitt were on the outs when the latter killed himself by strapping on a weight belt and taking a plunge into their coastal town’s underwater canyon, and so upset is Jay about this suicide (and the things left unsaid) that he refuses to read the letter Mitt left for him.

Instead, as his mom Zara (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd) sleep, Jay sneaks out to the coast, where he intends to find his dad’s never-recovered body by venturing into the deep blue sea.

As he enters the water, director Duffield’s camera dives in with him, bobbing madly as the waves toss Jay to and fro.

The ocean is angry, and after Jay fights his way through the surf and navigates a garden of seaweed and coral, he reaches the precipice of the gorge, where Whalefall provides a stunning panorama of the small protagonist dwarfed by his frighteningly enormous marine environment.

Duffield and Kraus’ script packs the early going with key narrative details about Mitt’s fabled scuba career and jerkily demanding parenting, as well as Jay’s frustration at never being good enough for his pops and his resentment of the tough love he suffered.

Such material is transparent table-setting for Jay’s climactic reckoning with his paternal hang-ups.

Yet first, Whalefall gets to the horror-y good stuff.

Peering over the ravine’s ledge, Jay witnesses a giant squid trying to evade an even larger sperm whale.

Unluckily stuck in the middle of these creatures’ path, Jay takes a thrashing.