Grief runs fathoms deep.

Writer-director Brian Duffield, the mind behind the near-silent alien chiller No One Will Save You, plunges into much darker water with Whalefall, arriving at Everyman on 16 October 2026. Snapped up by 20th Century Studios after a bidding war, it adapts Daniel Kraus's 2023 novel, with Kraus (who co-wrote The Shape of Water novel with Guillermo del Toro) sharing screenplay duties with Duffield. The result is a survival thriller that plays out almost in real time as one man fights his way out of the last place anyone would want to be: the inside of a sperm whale.

Austin Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, a young diver who heads out off California's central coast to recover the remains of his late father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), a gruff, demanding veteran of the deep. Then the unthinkable happens. A colossal whale swallows him whole. With roughly an hour of oxygen left in his tank, Jay has to draw on every lesson his father drilled into him, even the ones he resented, if he ever wants to see daylight again.

Flashbacks fill in the strained bond between father and son, with Elisabeth Shue as Jay's mother Zara, Jane Levy and Emily Rudd as his sisters Eva and Nan, and John Ortiz as Hewey. Duffield reunites with cinematographer Aaron Morton and composer Joseph Trapanese from No One Will Save You, while two-time Oscar winner Pietro Scalia handles the edit. Abrams performed almost all of his own stunts, shooting for real underwater rather than faking it on a dry stage.

Expect a claustrophobic, nerve-shredding ordeal with a surprisingly tender core, one that turns a desperate fight for air into a reckoning with a father Jay never quite managed to understand.

Did you know?

The whale's interior wasn't just a digital creation: the practical effects team at Weta built a real stomach set that could be flooded with water, with a beating heart beside it that reacted during takes. The team also built half of the whale's head, including the jaw and mouth, as an animatronic in a water tank. Draining the stomach overnight made it change shape, which left Duffield's carefully planned storyboards largely unusable once filming began.

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