Hallucinating journey through the digestive system of a sperm whale

In the comedy Anaconda, a frustrated filmmaker who wants to make a sequel to the 1997 film of the same name claims that he cannot just show a giant snake killing people: his film must be about something, it must address themes like grief. Such are the things of Hollywood mainstream: movies must belong to a specific genre so they can be sold more easily, but it must be noted that they explain something more, something important. Like Whalefall, a work in which the survival thriller is intertwined with family drama about (exactly) grief.

The film's protagonist is a young man who wants to reconcile with his dead father. While diving to locate his remains on the coast, he is eaten by a sperm whale. This contemporary Jonah, who must fulfill his mission of making peace with a stern patriarch and honoring him, faces a strange adventure with religious undertones and scatological airs: searching for orifices through which to escape the animal inside which he is trapped, in an unvarnished science-fiction version of Fantastic Voyage (or Innerspace).

The story is quite intense and claustrophobic images abound. Perhaps so that the experience is not overly distressing, and to underline the thematic aspect, scenes of physical resistance are interspersed with father-son flashbacks. Fans of the pure thriller might find too many emotional scenes, but all in all it contributes to making a movie that could be quite extreme become easier to swallow.