It's based on Daniel Kraus's bestseller, but something got lost in translation.
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Chief Film Critic
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Courtesy of 20th Century Studios “Whalefall” is an undersea thriller that would like to do for whales what “Jaws” did for sharks. But it doesn’t work out that way. The movie comes closer to doing for whales what “Howard the Duck” did for barnyard superheroes — it makes you never want to see one of them again. Whales, of course, are beautiful creatures, and the one in “Whalefall” is a sperm whale with the boxy shape of a submarine, long and angular, a sleekly gliding beast that rules the ocean. Yet for most of the movie, we’re inside that whale. Literally inside it. The central character, Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams), has gone scuba diving off the coast of Monastery Beach near Monterey, Ca., in search of the body of his father, a gruff seaman who committed suicide. (He had mesothelioma, a form of cancer that meant he couldn’t dive anymore; for him, that meant life was no longer worth living.)
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