New WHALEFALL Trailer Sends Austin Abrams Into One Seriously Terrifying Survival Nightmare
The new trailer for 20th Century Studios’ Whalefall looks like one hell of a stressful trip into the ocean.
Based on the bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus, Whalefall stars Austin Abrams as Jay Gardiner, a scuba diver who ends up trapped inside the stomach of an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale.
He has roughly one hour of oxygen left, which means he needs to figure out how to escape before the whale digests him.
The full trailer gives us a much better idea of just how intense that predicament gets. Jay is trapped in a cramped, hostile environment with the whale’s stomach walls contracting around him while his father’s voice keeps running through his head.
“Son, what are you gonna do?” Jay’s father, played by Josh Brolin, asks. “Just accept your fate?” Jay’s memories take him back to time spent with his dad on a fishing boat, including some tough survival advice that suddenly becomes very useful.
With his oxygen disappearing and very few options available, Jay starts using whatever he can find inside the whale as he searches for a possible way out as the memories with his father inspire him to press forward.
Those memories aren’t all warm father-and-son moments, either. Their relationship clearly had plenty of friction. Regardless, Jay has to put those lessons to work in the worst place imaginable.
As if being swallowed by a sperm whale isn’t enough of a problem, a squid gets sucked inside with him. Its tentacles become another obstacle as Jay fights his way through the whale while muscles contract and the space around him becomes increasingly dangerous.
The trailer eventually shows the whale breaching the surface, giving Jay what looks like his best shot at getting out. Unfortunately, gravity has other plans and threatens to send him right back down into the beast.
This movie looks awesome. The concept is wonderfully insane, but the trailer makes Whalefall look like a seriously intense survival thriller. Everything shown here makes the situation feel brutal, claustrophobic, and unpredictable.
I’m excited to see how Whalefall pulls this off. It looks weird, nerve-racking, and completely up my alley. Whalefall hits theaters on October 16.