The ocean is simply not our business
– 2 min read
In an excellent case of “great minds think alike”, Lainey texted me the trailer of Whalefall at the exact moment as I was opening the app to message her about the same thing.
What is Whalefall? It’s a movie about a whale accidentally eating a guy. It looks SICK. As in cool or gross, you decide:
Whalefall is directed by Brian Duffield, the screenwriter behind the Kristen Stewart underwater thriller Underwater, and the Babysitter duology (we will ignore the Divergent credit on his CV, sometimes, a toll must be paid). He also directed No One Will Save You, an offbeat sci-fi film starring Kaitlyn Dever (the once and future Loretta McCready). Brian Duffield has done enough interesting work for his next project to be Of Interest, but that he made a creature feature with a sperm whale is, frankly, rad as f-ck.
Whalefall is based on a novel by Daniel Kraus (Jaws, too, was based on a novel), and it’s about a scuba diver who is accidentally swallowed by a sperm whale. “Accidentally” is an important note, because I am not here for whale slander. I love whales, whales are awesome, they’re way too f-cking smart to actually eat people, even accidentally. Proof: it has happened more than once, and the whale always spits the person out (OF COURSE Cape Cod is involved. Widow’s Bay is a documentary).
But Whalefall is premised upon a sperm whale accidentally swallowing a diver while hunting a giant squid, so for the sake of the film, I accept the premise. I love that the trailer is almost entirely this sequence, because it is f-cking SCARY. I also love that it is not a malicious act, the whale is just minding its whale business and the diver got too close.
Whalefall is also a survival film, as the second part of the premise is that the diver, with limited air and also being stuck inside a whale’s gullet, must figure a way out before he dies. It’s “Jonah and the Whale” but the clock is ticking. It’s Pinocchio but there is no campfire in a whale’s belly. It’s a thalassophobic’s nightmare—that shot of the diver going over the underwater cliff is actual nightmare fuel.
As long as everyone is very clear that whales do not actually eat people and we pose far greater threat to them than they do to us (they pose no threat to us, we only pose threat to them), I am very into Whalefall as a concept. We also must be clear that the entire scenario is the result of human infringement upon the single most inhospitable, non-human environment on Earth. This wouldn’t happen if he wasn’t diving on a shelf. The ocean is not our business. No part of it was made for humans. We simply must stop going into the ocean! We are angering Poseidon!
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