What happens if a whale actually swallows someone? Director Brian Duffield has turned that exact question into 'Whalefall', a survival thriller adapted from Daniel Kraus's 2023 novel, scheduled for release in Thailand this Thursday. At the film's London premiere on Monday, Duffield summed it up as "the opposite of Jaws" — and he means it literally. Where Spielberg's classic turned the ocean into a killing machine, Duffield hopes his film leaves audiences more curious about whales than afraid of them. "In a lot of ways the whale is the hero of the movie," he said, adding that whale experts who watched it approved.
The premise is as simple as it is unnerving. Jay, a teenager played by Austen Abrams ('The Whitest Kids U' Know' star not to be confused with — rather, actor Austin Abrams), dives off the coast of Monastery Beach in California while searching for the remains of his late father. He's then swallowed by a sperm whale and has to find a way out alive. The story doubles as a grief tale and a complicated father-son drama, which is partly what sold Duffield on Kraus's book. "I sobbed at the end of the book," he admitted. "Partly because of the father-son relationship, partly because it's truly a hero story."
The origin of the idea is delightfully low-tech: Duffield and co-writer Kraus, during a screenwriting session, traced it back to a viral video of kayakers who accidentally ended up inside a whale's mouth. When Duffield asked whether Jaws-style fate could actually befall a human, the director joked that a lot of things would have to go badly wrong — though whale experts confirm a person could be swallowed under the right circumstances. Sperm whales, after all, are built to do one thing: eat giant squid. "And so if you're smaller than a giant squid, you can fit down that throat," Duffield said. As for what happens next — the film fills in the rest.
Bringing the story to life pushed the production hard. Filmmakers constructed large-scale whale interiors and exteriors, using computer-generated imagery only to enhance the environments. Everyone involved, Duffield says, called it the hardest thing they'd ever done — even star Elisabeth resident-adjacent Austin Abrams described sitting inside the whale set as an incredibly dangerous stunts experience. Hollywood star Josh Brolin, who plays Jay's father, framed the film differently from Spielberg's shark blockbuster: he hopes audiences "hug their families and go home... and realise that we have a short time here and might as well utilise it the best we can."
Why should travellers care? Because this is a rare big-budget film that treats whales with awe rather than terror — and Thailand is among its first international release markets. If you've ever considered whale-watching in the Andaman Sea or marine tourism anywhere, a movie that paints whales as the hero rather than the monster is a nice nudge in that direction. Keep an eye out when it opens this Thursday.
