The Whale (2022)

There are films that arrive quietly and leave a mark that takes days to shake off. The Wrestler did something similar for Darren Aronofsky back in 2008, and The Whale, released in 2022 through A24 and Aronofsky's own Protozoa Pictures, feels cut from a related cloth: a story of a person in physical and emotional ruin, given one last chance to repair something that may already be beyond fixing. The film is based on the 2012 stage play by Samuel D. Hunter, who also wrote the screenplay adaptation, and that theatrical origin shows in the way it unfolds almost entirely within a single cramped apartment. The stage-to-screen transition can sometimes produce work that feels airless or artificially confined, but here the constraint of the single location becomes part of the suffocation.

Aronofsky has spent his career making films that are, to put it plainly, difficult to sit through in the best possible sense. From the dependency spirals of Requiem for a Dream to the psychological unravelling at the centre of Black Swan, he has a consistent appetite for characters trapped in cycles of self-destruction, and The Whale fits that pattern without feeling like a retread. The film follows Charlie, a reclusive English teacher who, confined to his flat and in serious physical decline, tries to rebuild a relationship with his estranged teenage daughter over the course of a single week. It is a 117-minute film that rarely leaves that flat, and it does not flinch.

The casting of Brendan Fraser as Charlie was, for many viewers, the headline story when the film first screened at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022. Fraser, who had been largely absent from major productions for the better part of two decades, gives a performance that earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor, delivered almost entirely from beneath substantial prosthetics. Alongside him, Sadie Sink plays the daughter Ellie with a controlled ferocity that is genuinely unsettling at times, while Hong Chau, as Charlie's friend and carer Liz, brings a grounded warmth that the film badly needs as a counterweight. Ty Simpkins and Samantha Morton round out the small ensemble, and the whole thing functions more like chamber theatre than conventional Hollywood drama. Fraser's history with smaller, more character-driven work, including his performance in The Quiet American, suggested the range was always there, and here it is fully on display.

This is not a movie about a fat guy. A movie that elicits this type of reaction cannot be anything but a 5* The fat thing... that's inconsequential. It's not REALLY part of it. This is a story about grief, about loss, about life and about the people involved, and the people left behind. It was beautifully written, beautifully scored but this movie WILL CRUSH YOU. It's so good, but I never want to watch it again.

I think what stays with me, beyond anything else, is how thoroughly the film refuses to let you keep it at a distance. You come in expecting one kind of story and you get something much harder and much more honest. Whether it repays a second watch is a genuine question I have asked myself, and my honest answer is the same as the one I arrived at when the credits rolled: some films earn the right to only be seen once, and that is not a criticism. It sits in the memory in a way that polished but unremarkable drama rarely does. Make of that what you will, but go in prepared.

Rating: ★★★★★  | Year: 2022  | Watched: 2025-05-04

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for The Whale (2022) on YouTube

Where to watch

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Darren Aronofsky: Black Swan (2010) · Requiem for a Dream (2000) · The Wrestler (2008)
More with Brendan Fraser: The Quiet American (2002)
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)