What a needlessly depressing watch this turned out to be.
I walked into The Whale cautiously optimistic. A chamber drama about regret, faith, family, and the limits of redemption. A comeback vehicle for Brendan Fraser under the banner of A24. On paper, that is catnip for awards season and catnip for me. In execution, it left me agitated, irritated, and oddly hollow.
The film follows Charlie, a reclusive English teacher living with severe obesity, who attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter before his declining health catches up with him. The premise suggests intimacy. It suggests excavation. It suggests a character study about shame, sexuality, and self punishment. Instead, it often feels like a theatrical endurance test.
Sorry to say, but this film really does not offer any real productive artistic outlet for the kind of funereal tone it has. It is relentlessly somber without discovering new emotional terrain. The misery becomes monotonous. The suffering feels underlined in thick red ink. And by the time we arrive at its final stretch, the film is operating less in the realm of human behavior and more in the realm of pure symbol.
Aronofsky has never been subtle. From Requiem for a Dream to Black Swan to mother!, he gravitates toward operatic anguish. Here, however, the intensity curdles into something suffocating. The script is so ruthlessly literal in its metaphors that it starts to feel like parody. Have you guys ever heard of Moby Dick. Trust me, you will.
There are worthwhile ideas buried in here. Our relationship to our bodies. The intersection of religion and guilt. The ways in which sexuality can fracture families and identities. But beyond surface manipulation, you rarely feel those ideas breathe. Characters announce their wants, their needs, their pain in monologues that feel engineered for catharsis rather than discovered through lived experience.
Brendan Fraser is clearly channeling something raw and personal. There are moments where his eyes well up and you see authentic hurt flicker across his face. I am happy for B Fraser. Truly. His return to leading roles is heartening, and he is committed here. But the performance is often reduced to sobbing through dialogue that strains for profundity. His character’s repeated insistence that people are amazing begins to feel less like conviction and more like screenplay mantra.
It is possible to be happy for a comeback and still think the vehicle is simplistic, easy, closed circuit claptrap. This is a classic example of a movie being so unbearably full of itself that it intermittently transforms into a pretty funny parody of the very film it is attempting to be. Simple Jack for Aronofsky heads, or maybe his Norbit. Harsh, I know. But there were moments where the tonal miscalculations were so glaring that I almost laughed.
The single location setting amplifies the artificiality. Characters enter like emissaries of theme. The missionary, played by Ty Simpkins, exists largely to externalize questions of salvation. The daughter, portrayed by Sadie Sink, is written with such relentless hostility that as she shouts I hate everyone, I too found myself thinking, same. Not because I sympathized with her rage, but because the film had exhausted me.
The one dynamic that truly works is between Fraser and Hong Chau. Their shared history feels lived in. There is tenderness in the way she tends to him, frustration braided with love. It is the emotional heart of the film. When she is on screen, the movie briefly approaches something grounded and humane.
There is also a late scene opposite Samantha Morton that crackles with authenticity. It is less declarative, more reflective. You glimpse a past that feels real rather than diagrammed. It is frustrating, because it proves the film could have operated on that register more consistently.
Visually, Aronofsky makes choices that border on gawking. The camera lingers in ways that feel less empathetic and more carnivalesque. The score by Rob Simonsen swells so insistently that it undercuts rather than enhances emotion. By the time the final image arrives, aiming for transcendence, I found it so on the nose that it nearly tipped into unintentional comedy.
For some reason, this movie has made me really agitated and irritated. Good job, Aronofsky. Great going. I do not find catharsis in a story where the protagonist has essentially surrendered before the narrative even begins. Without genuine evolution, the suffering feels preordained.
Hopefully Fraser will get better parts in the coming months and years. He deserves material that trusts him more and underlines less. As it stands, The Whale is an awards season conversation piece masquerading as profound tragedy. It wants to devastate you. Instead, it left me mostly annoyed.
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