Whalefall

 The dynamic of the gruff father and the inept son has been at the centre of countless films of every genre, from animated movies to comedies and horror. Yet no one had ever dissected it quite like this: from inside a sperm whale. 

Half an hour into WHALEFALL, Jay, the son, is swallowed by a giant sperm whale and, from that moment until the end of the film, tries to make his way back up its oesophagus and escape alive. 

Jay is not the target of the sperm whale’s hunt. He ends up being swallowed because, in a sequence that seems to have emerged from a feverish nightmare, a giant squid, a delicacy for sperm whales, is hunted down and devoured by the cetacean. Before being swallowed himself, however, the squid grabs Jay with one of its tentacles, dragging him into the predator’s jaws. Jay finds himself in the first stomach chamber, where the squid that dragged him there continues to cause trouble: it is still alive and attacks him with its sharp beak while crushing him with its tentacles. But all this movement triggers a violent peristaltic contraction, which pushes the squid into the next stomach chamber and leaves Jay with a fractured rib. 

Fine. 

After this bestial struggle, the viewer looks around, checks the time and realises there is still well over an hour of film left. And wonders: now what? What happens next? 

Jay is alone, with no apparently useful means of survival, inside a sperm whale’s stomach, in a dark, deep sea. 

From this point on, the film takes an entirely different direction. It stops being merely an action and survival film and launches headfirst into the turbulent waters of the parent-child relationship, diving in recklessly, eyes closed. Through psychotic delusions and Buddhist reincarnations, Jay and his father, Mitt, will finally find a way to communicate for the first time in their lives, or rather, in their very existence, attempting to heal their respective wounds. 

In an echo of The Shining, as has happened in so many other cult films of the genre, the boundary between reality and psychosis, between the physical and the metaphysical worlds, grows increasingly thin until it begins to dissolve. 

Jay, now with his eardrums torn by the pressure of the ocean depths and an injured ankle, seems to hear whispers. It is his father speaking to him. But not from some kind of afterlife: his father is the sperm whale. Or rather, his father has been reincarnated as a sperm whale. 

The very same one that swallowed him and wants to digest him. The two begin to talk, perhaps for the first time, and through stereotypical lines and flashbacks, the film’s message finally comes into view. Like many other fathers, Mitt, in his attempt to “provide all the tools necessary for life, so that his son can freely choose what to do”, ends up overriding his son’s freedom of choice. 

As relevant as the theme may be, it is perhaps by now overused. On a moral level, WHALEFALL does not seem to have anything new to say: parents must allow their children to spread their wings and follow their own path. 

A process that, as we well know, inevitably involves distance, both physical and emotional. L’estranea, by Strippoli, tells us this through supernatural horror; Il fuoco che ti porti dentro, through a dramatic Christmas dinner. WHALEFALL does it with a sperm whale. 

If this has not become clear by now, WHALEFALL is Dionysian. Not only because it is a mad, bizarre and at times unsettling film, but because it does not ask to be understood rationally. It simply reveals itself. Scene after scene, madness takes over and we find ourselves divided: one part of us tries to rationalise what it sees and finds endless reasons to tear the film to shreds; the other stops resisting and simply chooses to plunge into the darkness of the marine abyss. 

And the madness persists even in the ending, which is violently metaphorical. Jay realises, in fact, that in order to move forward, he must let his father go. He must kill the toxic memory of him. And to do so, he kills him. Literally. 

To escape from the stomach, he uses some of the objects he has brought with him to pierce the stomach wall and the body of his father-whale, thus managing to resurface and, finally, breathe again. 

WHALEFALL is an unusual film, to say the least. It may be the kind of film we would choose to watch alone at the cinema, for fear of being ridiculed for its premise and its various plot missteps, yet one we would end up secretly loving and thanking for having made us feel something alive. 

Something. 

“Dionysus is the god of immediate presence... He does not teach, he gives no laws: he simply appears. His presence is a miracle that disrupts ordinary existence. Those who welcome him are swept away in ecstasy; those who reject him are overwhelmed by the whirlwind of his madness.” 

— Dionysus, Walter F. Otto