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Michael Packard spent less than 45 seconds inside a humpback whale’s mouth off Provincetown, Massachusetts, in June 2021. CNN has now put him in a 4DX seat in front of Whalefall, the 20th Century Studios survival thriller that does the same thing to Austin Abrams and keeps him there for an hour.
“It felt like I was inside of a live creature that was trying to eat me,” Packard said of 2021. The 4DX presentation, which pitches the seats and sprays the audience, got close enough that he found himself back in his own: “He was there where the tongue was contracting, and I could feel the tongue of my whale contracting on me.”
Forty-Five Seconds Off Provincetown
Packard was lobster diving in June 2021 when something hit him, as he has described it, like a freight train, and the light went out. His mouthpiece was knocked loose. Once he recovered it he worked out that he was inside the baleen-lined jaws of a humpback, and he thought about his wife and his two young children. The whale ran for the surface and spat him out. He came away with minor injuries.
The Difference Is the Throat
Packard was never going to be swallowed. Humpbacks are filter feeders built for krill and small schooling fish, so a diver can fit in the mouth and go no further, and the animal that caught him was reportedly as lost as he was about what to do next.
Whalefall reaches for a sperm whale instead, and the choice is researched rather than convenient. Daniel Kraus, who wrote the 2023 novel and co-wrote the screenplay with director Brian Duffield, went to specialists to work out what circumstances would let a whale actually take a person in. The answer was a sperm whale, which unlike a humpback has a throat wide enough to matter.
Abrams Is Alone for Most of It
Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, diving off the central coast of California for his dead father’s remains when the whale takes him, with roughly an hour of air on his back. Josh Brolin plays the father, Mitt, and the official synopsis puts what Mitt taught him at the center of any way out. Elisabeth Shue, John Ortiz, Jane Levy and Emily Rudd fill out the cast.
Duffield directs. His previous film, No One Will Save You, ran almost wordlessly on Kaitlyn Dever alone, which is a strange thing to have on a resume and precisely what this job asks for. It is also why the trailer could sell the whole film on one sentence of plot.
Whalefall opened exclusively in theaters on October 16. Packard was out in under a minute. Abrams gets an hour of air and the whole runtime to spend it.
Fan verdict and scores by iHorror