Movie vs. Book
A note before we enter the whale: This post contains mild spoilers about the themes, characters, and differences between the Whalefall book and movie, but I won’t spoil either ending.
I Have Three Extremely Specific Fears, So Naturally I Read Whalefall
I have submechanophobia, megalodonophobia, and a very specific fear of being eaten alive.
So naturally, I read Whalefall.
And then, because apparently surviving the book wasn’t enough for me, I paid actual American dollars to sit in a dark theater and watch the movie.
Let me explain how we got here.
I Am Not a Horror Person
Despite everything about this story suggesting otherwise, I am not particularly into horror.
I don’t like splatterpunk. I don’t enjoy excessive gore for the sake of gore. I couldn’t even finish Tender Is the Flesh. I can handle dark books—I WRITE dark books—but there is a very particular line where my brain decides, Nope. We’re done here.
What I do love are survival stories and thrillers.
And that is how Whalefall found me.
Someone on TikTok described the book as horror specifically because she was terrified of whales. Not because it was filled with the kinds of things that normally keep me away from horror. Just:
Big whale.
Ocean.
Man gets swallowed.
Terrifying.
And I thought, Perfect.
I’ll be scared, but I won’t be grossed out.
This was my first mistake.
Where the Hell Is the Whale?
I interrupted my ongoing Murderbot obsession for this book.
That alone should tell you how serious this was.
I waited for my copy to arrive. I opened it fully prepared to be psychologically tormented by a sperm whale.
And then I immediately started fighting with Daniel Kraus’s sentence structure.
I have dyslexia, and the fragmented prose does not naturally cooperate with the way my brain reads. I kept mentally rebuilding sentences as I went, adding the connective tissue my brain wanted to be there.
By page five, I was already irritated.
My original assessment was essentially:
You have approximately 314 pages to fix your attitude because I refuse to DNF you.
Then I reached page 59.
Still no whale.
Excuse me?
I was promised a whale.
I had arrived specifically to be terrorized by a whale.
WHERE IS THE WHALE?
The whale arrived around page 80.
I would like to formally apologize for asking where the whale was.
Page 118 and I Are Enemies
There are fears you know you have.
And then there are fears that a book apparently knows you have and decides to locate with surgical precision.
I knew going into Whalefall that the concept of being swallowed alive bothered me. I knew the ocean bothered me. I knew enormous things lurking beneath dark water bothered me.
I did not fully understand how violently my brain would react when the book stopped presenting those things as abstract fears and started giving me sensory details.
Then I reached page 118.
No.
Absolutely not.
I had to stop reading.
Some of the descriptions made me genuinely nauseous. Not “ew, gross” nauseous. I mean my body was reacting while my brain was going, We have made a terrible mistake.
I abandoned the whale for a while.
But here’s the problem:
I needed to know what happened.
So I went back.
The Whale and I Reached an Understanding
By page 213, I posted an update:
“The whale and I have reached an understanding. I still don’t like being here.”
And somehow I just kept going.
Page 246.
Day two.
Still alive.
Daddy issues and all.
Because somewhere between asking where the hell the whale was, immediately regretting asking for the whale, desperately wanting Jay to GET OUT OF THE WHALE, and wondering why I had voluntarily done this to myself, the book changed.
Or maybe my understanding of it did.
It wasn’t really about the whale anymore.
It was about Jay.
It was about his father.
It was about grief and anger and the horrible mess of loving someone when your relationship with them has caused you pain.
And THAT got me.
I understand complicated relationships with parents. I understand how love, resentment, grief, anger, guilt, and longing can coexist in ways that don’t fit neatly into “good relationship” or “bad relationship.”
Jay’s relationship with his father felt painfully human to me.
Suddenly I wasn’t reading because I needed to know whether Jay escaped the whale.
I needed to know what happened to Jay.
Those are two very different things.
At one point, I was literally walking down my road reading because I couldn’t put the book down. I was also trying to hide the fact that I was crying from my neighbors, which is a perfectly dignified way for a 35-year-old woman to behave.
By the end, I was sobbing.
Not cute crying.
Sobbing.
I bought Whalefall expecting to read it, watch the movie, and move on with my life.
Instead, I gave it five stars and permanently surrendered a spot on my very limited bookshelf.
Forever shelf.
Don’t touch my copy.
I’m still mad about it.
Naturally, I Then Went to See the Movie
You might think that after discovering a book could physically activate one of my extremely specific fears, I would say:
“Well! That was an interesting experience. I never need to see that depicted visually.”
Incorrect.
I bought a movie ticket.
The funniest part happened before I even got into the theater.
When I went to buy my ticket and saw the Whalefall poster, my body apparently remembered the book before my conscious brain caught up.
My immediate reaction was:
Oh God. I’m going to puke.
Reader, I bought the ticket anyway.
At this point, we are no longer pretending I make good decisions.
The Movie vs. the Book
I liked the movie.
Quite a bit, actually.
The casting worked for me, and I appreciated seeing actors I didn’t immediately recognize from twelve other things. I also loved that the adaptation kept several of the moments between Jay and his father that had mattered to me in the book, including the scene with the baby.
The ending is different.
And, surprisingly, I liked the movie’s ending too.
I’m usually the person sitting there going, “WHY DID YOU CHANGE IT?”
But this worked for me.
The movie also made me cry.
However:
The book made me SOB.
And if I had to choose between them, I would choose the book without hesitation.
The biggest thing lost in the adaptation is Jay himself.
We spend so much time inside Jay’s head in the novel that his relationship with his father—and with his entire family—has layers the movie simply doesn’t have enough time to reproduce.
Book Jay is angry.
Book Jay is grieving.
Book Jay is hurt.
Book Jay loves his father.
Book Jay resents his father.
All of those things can exist at the same time.
Without as much access to that interiority, Movie Jay occasionally comes across as simply spoiled in moments where Book Jay felt much more complicated to me.
I also preferred his sisters in the book. They felt flatter in the movie, and I felt similarly about his mother. The movie gives us the information we need, but the family relationships didn’t carry the same emotional weight for me.
Although there was one additional problem with his mother that absolutely no filmmaker could have anticipated:
She looked bizarrely like my former pastor.
So periodically my brain would interrupt this extremely emotional survival story to demand:
Why are YOU inside this whale movie?
Obviously, this affected no one else’s viewing experience.
But it certainly affected mine.
So Which One Wins?
The book.
Five stars.
Forever shelf.
Page 118 and I remain enemies and will not be reconciling.
What surprised me most about Whalefall is that the whale ended up being the least interesting reason to remember it.
Yes, the premise got me there. A man gets swallowed by a sperm whale and has to survive inside it. That is an objectively insane sentence, and I was absolutely willing to show up for it.
But that isn’t why I cried.
It isn’t why I read the book in two days when I’d been annoyed by the prose from page five.
It isn’t why I was walking down the road with the book open because putting it down apparently wasn’t an option anymore.
And it isn’t why a book I expected to read once now has permanent residency on my bookshelf.
The whale is the survival story.
Jay and his father are the story.
Which is extremely rude, frankly, because I came here to be scared of a whale.
I did not consent to emotional damage.
And yet, here we are.
Five stars.
🐋
Final Whalefall survival report:
I found the whale.
I regretted finding the whale.
The whale and I reached an understanding.
I survived page 118.
I cried over daddy issues.
I put the book on my forever shelf.
And then I paid money to experience the entire problem again in IMAX-sized whale form.
I regret nothing.
Except page 118.
