Whalefall ending explained, plus what the movie got real and fake about sperm whales

Whalefall has an ending that surprised me, and it's unlike any movie I've ever seen before. Below I'll walk through how Jay ends up trapped inside a sperm whale, how he gets out, and what the movie got real and fake about surviving in there. Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen it yet.

Starring Josh Brolin and Austin Abrams, this is a very simple movie at its core. Later in this piece I'll answer the big question the film left me with: can a human actually survive inside a sperm whale? The short answer from me is a firm no.

Whalefall opens with a father's death and a son's guilt

The film opens with Jay's father, a scuba diver from California who was diagnosed with an illness. Despite being offered doctor's care, he chooses to end his life on his own terms. He jumps off a boat and drowns himself in the ocean where he loved to scuba dive. His remains were never recovered, and the movie picks up one year later.

Jay, played by Austin Abrams, is the main character, and he carries guilt because he had a terrible relationship with his father. He also never visited him in the last few months before his death. Through flashbacks, we see that his father was not a great father to Jay. He was always pushing him and being extremely tough on him, to the point where Jay never wanted to be around him. Jay even intentionally chose a college that let him cut off contact.

But in an attempt to give his family peace, Jay decides to dive off the beach to try to find his father's remains.

Jay gets swallowed by a sperm whale chasing a squid

This movie gets intense right away, with horror vibes. While Jay is diving, he sees a squid swimming away from a sperm whale. As he tries to get away from the animals, Jay is caught up in the squid's tentacles and accidentally sucked into the whale's mouth along with the squid the whale was trying to eat.

His scuba tank is damaged and holds roughly one hour of breathable air, and Jay finds himself trapped in the stomach of a whale. I thought that setup was absolutely wild. Once Jay gets sucked into the whale, it becomes its own horror movie in itself.

Inside the whale, Jay faces methane, a squid and stomach acid

Although the whale's stomach is not filled entirely with water, the air is toxic with methane. Jay also has to fight other challenges, including the squid trying to kill him and the whale's stomach attempting to chew him. He eventually breaks his ribs and gets a cut on his neck from the squid.

Sperm whales actually have different chambers, as depicted in the movie. At first, Jay is in a chamber that just has water, which is where the whale chews. Eventually he makes his way into another chamber, but this one has stomach acid that burns his skin so badly that his hands start bleeding terribly.

In one of the more shocking scenes, he attempts to go up the whale's esophagus while a bioluminescent jellyfish lights up the stomach. The whale opens its mouth and Jay tries to call out to a boat that's nearby, but he's unsuccessful. The whale dives rapidly, knocking him down, and he breaks his leg.

Jay's conversations with his dad were most likely hallucinations

One of the most pivotal parts of the movie is when Jay starts to almost hallucinate talking to his dad. Some people may have interpreted it as the spirit of his dad talking to him, but in reality, this was most likely hallucinations and his mind completely unraveling because of the mental state he was in at the time.

Think about everything that happened to him. In less than an hour, Jay had been swallowed by a whale, broken his ribs, broken his foot, had his hands burned by acid and his neck cut, and had barely any air left. That is a lot of traumatic stuff to happen in less than an hour.

Throughout the movie we get flashbacks to Jay and his father's relationship, and we see different times when his dad was not supportive of him. But we also see times when his dad taught him things about the ocean, and Jay is able to use this to his advantage.

His father's lessons about methane give Jay a way out

After the sperm whale is attacked by orcas, it goes back up to the surface. This is when Jay remembers a story his dad told him about methane. Earlier in the movie, there's a flashback of his dad talking about needing more weights, so Jay has some batteries in the back of his trunk and brings them with him.

Luckily, Jay still has these batteries on him. He remembers his dad explaining how methane, oxygen and an ignition can create a massive explosion, and he knows this is his only way out. With just a little bit of oxygen left, Jay lights up his tank, blows a hole in the whale and escapes to the surface. A boat that was nearby saw the explosion and saved him.

Even though he had a terrible relationship with his father, the survival skills his father taught him throughout the movie saved his life.

Jay never finds his father's bones, but he does get closure

Jay did not recover his father's bones, but he did get closure. Inside the whale, while he was having these hallucinations and was in a bad mental state, he had conversations he never got to have with his father in real life.

Whether that was the spirit of his dad or just a hallucination doesn't matter. Jay realizes that his father did love him in the only way he could, and that he gave him the proper tools to help him survive in the world.

The chambered stomach is real, but the glowing walls are exaggerated

The movie made me wonder whether a human could actually survive inside a sperm whale, so here's what was true and what was fake. First, a whale swallowing a human whole is something that is 100% real, and it can only happen with a sperm whale. The chambered stomach we see in the film is also 100% real, because sperm whales have a very complicated digestive tract. The acoustic clicks vibrating the body were 100% real as well.

Unfortunately, the glowing bioluminescent stomach walls from jellyfish were exaggerated for the movie, because sperm whales do not eat these. Also fake is the amount of room Jay has to move around. If you actually got swallowed by a sperm whale, you would basically just be trapped and not even be able to move your arms.

A real person would not survive what Jay survives

And lastly, the big question: can you survive being inside a sperm whale's stomach? The answer is 100% no. Something the movie doesn't mention is that a sperm whale's internal core body temperature is 99 degrees. So it would be extremely hot inside, and you would most likely die from heat stroke.

On top of this, as the whale dives thousands of feet down, the ambient water pressure would compress the diver's lungs. Jay survives in the movie, but in reality his lungs would have collapsed and he would have died. If this was real life, Jay would 100% not have survived at all.

As for someone being swallowed by a whale in the first place, "the chances are probably more than winning the lottery 100 times and getting struck by lightning 100 times, but the chances are not zero."

I absolutely loved the scenes inside the different stomachs. I feel like it was something very original that I've never seen before, and it felt like a horror movie I've never seen.

What was your favorite scene in Whalefall?