Josh Brolin is back in a new Whalefall trailer released on Wednesday, and the preview goes straight for the film’s strangest hook. It centers on a young man swallowed by a sperm whale, with Austin Abrams also in the trailer.
“I’m always going to click on a movie preview whenever Josh Brolin is involved,” David Hookstead wrote, adding that “The man is a true A-list talent, and pretty much everything he touches turns into gold.” That reaction tracks with a trailer built around a 60-ton sperm whale and only an hour of oxygen left for the character trapped inside it.
Daniel Kraus and the novel
Whalefall is based on a novel written by Daniel Kraus, and the trailer leans hard into the premise instead of trying to soften it. Hookstead’s blunt take was even cleaner: “No, that is not a joke. That is 100% the plot of the film.”
That directness is the right move. A survival setup this extreme needs to sell the mechanics immediately, because the trailer is not asking viewers to admire the concept from a distance; it is asking them to believe a man can be inside a whale and still have a fight worth watching.
James Bartley claims
The trailer also lands in a story that has a built-in factual wrinkle. The film’s premise has no proven real-life historical example, and claims that James Bartley survived being swallowed by a sperm whale in the 1800s have been thoroughly debunked.
That leaves the movie selling fiction as fiction, which is probably the only viable lane here. The trailer’s job is not to prove the event could happen in the real world; it is to make the audience care about what happens in the whale, and the preview seems built around that gamble.
What the trailer sets up
One viewer called it, “This film has the potential to be the best comedy of the year.” Another doubled down with, “Yeah, same thing happened to me. Luckily, I had some pepper with me and got the whale to sneeze me out. I also found my dad in there, we all lived happily ever after.”
Josh Brolin’s role is not stated, but his name is doing a lot of work already. If the trailer keeps selling the premise this hard, the next thing viewers will want is the part Brolin actually plays in a story that lives or dies on how seriously it treats an absurd situation.
