I pay more attention to literary awards than I should. It’s one of the great flaws of my reading life. Consider it an extension of my obsession with the Oscar race, if you must; that would make sense. To wit, earlier this year I was thrown back on my heels when the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to a book called Angel Down. Ostensibly a horror novel, it’s set on a World War I battlefield during a suicide mission, and, true to the title, an angel gets involved.
Oh, and the literary gimmick is that the whole thing is written as one sentence. I’ve yet to read Angel Down, and surely that approach serves a greater purpose than the cynic in me wants to allow. Whatever the means, a genre book won the Pulitzer. That’s a rare enough occurrence, and rarer still when the book sniffs toward the macabre.
You’re probably wondering why I’m bringing this up. Well, the author of Angel Down is a fellow named Daniel Kraus. Before the win that put him on the radar of literati across the country, he was mostly known as the guy who collaborated with George Romero and Guillermo del Toro on expanding their ideas into novels, a bit like Chuck Hogan or Meg Gardiner in recent years. Fruitful endeavors, to be certain, but hard to get excited about. Somewhere in between, he wrote a book called Whalefall for MTV Books. I didn’t know MTV published books. I didn’t even know MTV was still around. I don’t have cable anymore.
But the book: it’s about a young man named Jay whose overbearing, alcoholic father was a deep-sea diver who tried to instill the same obsession in his son. Of course, Jay had no interest. Blasted kids and their desire to have fun instead of scrounging along the bottom of the ocean! Quickly succumbing to mesothelioma, his dad decided to take one last dive and never come back up. That’s where the story begins, with Jay home from college for a weekend with his mother and sisters, one year after his father’s suicide. The man’s body was never recovered, so his son decides to make a long-awaited dive to find his remains.
And then a whale swallows him. Whether and how he survives is the crux of the thing, and to be clear, it’s an attractive premise to build a movie around. Add Kraus’ newly minted literary prestige, Brian Duffield behind the camera (his alien home-invasion hybrid No One Will Save You was something of a cult hit for Hulu), and a burgeoning star in Austin Abrams, and it’s hard not to feel like a winner is right around the corner.
And yet…
For the first hour of Whalefall, you settle into a groove with it. You know he’s going into the whale, and if you’re unfamiliar with the source material (like me), there are only a couple of ways it can go. Either it’s a harsh, realistic tale of survival, or (given the author’s pedigree, this isn’t too out there) something more fantastical happens. It’s a “Dead Dad” story, so it really could go either way. Would it be a stretch to imagine him hanging out with some manifestation of his pops in the belly of Monstro?
As it turns out, the former is the right guess. Duffield and crew drop Jay right down the whale’s gullet, and, I cannot stress this enough, it’s very gross. Jay is constantly battered, smooshed, slimed and generally messed up by whatever sits inside the belly of the beast. There’s a Raimi-esque quality to the abuse Abrams is subjected to, especially once his wounds turn pus-filled and infected. Still, he keeps trying to climb back up through the whale’s intestinal tract, even after stomach acid has left his hands raw and he can no longer walk on two feet. Between the literal body horror and the high-pitched shriek squeezed out of him every time Jay is knocked from one chamber to another, Abrams is entering full-fledged “scream king” territory.
A minimalist take that leaned into biological horror would have been refreshing, but the siren song of using past memories to keep the story humming is hard to resist. It’s been done well (Cast Away) and less well (Project Hail Mary), so there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. And so, while Abrams is getting Bruce Campbelled all over the place, we frequently lapse into Jay’s memories, all of them centered on his father. Based on this, you’d wonder if his mother played any role in his life at all. Here we learn about his reluctance to connect with his dad (Josh Brolin, nautically tatted up and looking a lot like Danny Trejo in his prime) and just how overbearing the man was. There’s no middle ground in this relationship: you either want to connect with nature or you want to have fun. You can guess which one Jay chose.
It’s largely good enough up to that point, but once you realize this thing is headed toward a giant-sized scoop of schmaltz, the whole effort collapses in front of you. I’m a writer of modest output and a reader of somewhat greater skill, and one of my biggest pet peeves is when memories become tools for solving the plot. I had completely blanked on Slumdog Millionaire, but my partner reminded me that Danny Boyle’s Best Picture winner is Public Enemy No. 1 in that regard. With Whalefall, we have a new challenger for the crown, as Jay’s recollections of his father serve less as character-building moments and more as clues to be pieced together. It’s cheap storytelling, and it sours everything that came before. I won’t even touch the semi-magical-realist element that comes to the fore and changes the tone of the whole movie.
Suddenly, it was impossible to see Whalefall as anything but a puzzle: a cheeseball version of an ’80s adventure game, where everything in your pockets and whatever you can find around you pushes you toward the conclusion. Except here, you don’t even get the satisfaction of solving it yourself. By the end, the whole thing turns so saccharine and false that it made me wonder whether I ever want to crack open the copy of Angel Down that’s been sitting on my shelf these last few months.
There’s a scene near the end where Jay and his father discuss John Steinbeck’s classic Cannery Row. “Steinbeck is god,” his dad says, and they bond over the famous scene of a quilt made from lingerie. I have no idea whether this comes from the book or is rooted in Brolin’s well-known appreciation for Steinbeck, but it’s easily the best scene in the back half of the film: a father and son simply connecting over a shared love of something. Yes, it acts as a counterweight to the rancor around diving that infects the rest of their scenes, but at least it’s a memory that colors a little outside the lines. I wish we’d gotten more of that. C’est la vie.