“I called up some whale experts.”
This reviewer was given the opportunity to attend the Whalefall panel at the 2026 NYC Comic Con. A whalefall is a phenomenon in nature when a cetacean dies and sinks to the ocean depths. There, in deep places where no light can reach, life blooms as scavengers converge to feast on the massive corpse, living within the remains and stripping it down to the bones.
Whalefall is also a 2026 20th Century Studios picture directed by Brian Duffield. The film is an adaptation of the 2023 novel by the same name written by Daniel Kraus, who co-wrote the movie. The film stars Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin, and Elizabeth Shue. The panel at Comic-Con was composed of director Duffield, Kraus, Brolin and Abrams.
The team showed several horrifying film trailers and then discussed making the picture.
“I knew the guts of it, so to speak.”
The feature tells a literally fantastical, claustrophobic, and terrifying tale of a scuba diver named Jay (Abrams), diving off of Monterey, California. He is snagged by a giant squid who is being devoured by a large sperm whale. The huge grey beast is an Old Man of the Sea, crisscrossed with ancient battle scars, swift and canny. The whale noms on the squid like it’s nothing. The tentacle is still firmly attached to the boy, so down the gullet he goes like Geppetto, swallowed by Monstro in 1940’s classic Pinocchio.
He wakes in the whale’s digestive tract, his surroundings visible due to bioluminescence in the whale’s gut, and after assessing the situation, determines he’s fucked. He has an hour of air left in his tank, leaving him an hour to get the hell out of a whale’s guts and then he realizes he’s not alone. The giant squid is in there with him. The giant squid is in there with him, and it is still alive. It is still alive and very much wants to eat Jay, its razor-sharp beak eagerly snapping with salivary anticipation. Jay’s not fucked, he’s really fucked. What will he do? What can he do? Please see the hair-raising Whalefall to find out.
“Just be glad that you’re alive and you have people.”
The backbone of the film is the estranged relationship between Abrams and Brolin, who plays Mitt, the brusque and unvarnished father who doesn’t know how to communicate with his son and appears in flashbacks while Jay struggles through his ordeal.
It was fascinating listening to them talk about the movie and the difficulties doing as many effects as possible practically created for the crew. The whale innards were created by a team from Wētā FX who faced the complicated challenge with innovative solutions. They created several drum-shaped, camera-accessible platforms on gimbals along with articulated and flexible cabled sections that puppeteers could manipulate, simulating expansions and contractions of the digestive tract.
The film was shot largely in sequence, so Abrams spent most of his time in the dank whale-set, soaked to the bone and battered by various parts of the set. Brolin, who grew up around fishermen and boned fish when he was 15, got very into the minutiae of his character. He obsessed over Mitt’s various tattoos and consulted with the Steinbeck Center in Salinas to make sure they were correct. After shooting Whalefall, Brolin got a large nautical tattoo on his back.
Whalefall looks ghastly, gruesome, intense, and horrendous. It could be a great horror film.
Whalefall opens in theatres 10/16/2026.
Newsdesk