In the New Movie ‘Whalefall,’ a Cetacean Swallows a Diver Whole. The Sperm Whale’s Remarkable Anatomy and Feeding Habits Shape the Survival Thriller

The film, an adaptation of Daniel Kraus’ 2023 novel, tells the story of a young man with an extremely challenging task: make it out of a whale’s stomach alive

Kunjal Bastola | Editorial Intern

October 16, 2026 1:45 p.m.

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Kayakers sometimes end up in the mouths of humpback whales. Viral videos in recent years reveal how it occurs: As the paddlers move along the water, a whale rises above the surface with its huge mouth open and takes in the people and the vessel. Shortly afterward, the whale lets them go.

That’s what happened to Adrián Simancas in 2025 when he was kayaking in Chile’s Strait of Magellan. “I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I realized I was inside the whale’s mouth,” he told the BBC. “Finally, I got to the surface and realized that it hadn’t eaten me.”

Back in 2020, two kayakers were swept into the mouth of a humpback whale in California before being released. This incident reportedly inspired author Daniel Kraus’ 2023 novel, Whalefall. The novel’s movie adaptation, directed by Brian Duffield and starring Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin, is in theaters now.

“I was kind of hanging out with some friends outside, because this was during Covid, and they were talking about a viral video of a kayaker who ends up in the mouth,” says Kraus, whose latest novel, Angel Down, won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. “That immediately made me think if a person really could be swallowed by a whale, like, if that’s actually biologically possible, and that got me excited.”

The book revolves around Jay Gardiner, a teenager living on the California coast. Jay is dealing with the death of his father, with whom he had a complicated relationship.

“Jay’s dad, Mitt, was kind of a local legend as a diver, and that’s part of the metaphor too, is that his dad was like a whale, in the sense that he was this huge presence and force that essentially swallowed up Jay,” says Kraus. “He wasn’t Jay; he was just Mitt Gardiner’s son and expected to be a man of the sea and the model of his father.”

To escape the tension, Jay leaves home and stays with friends, refusing to visit his dad, even after he is diagnosed with cancer. Mitt eventually throws himself off a boat, knowing that otherwise he will soon die from the cancer.

Later, Jay goes diving in the area where his dad died and tries to find his remains as a way “to make peace with the rest of his family,” Kraus says. While submerged, Jay is swallowed by a sperm whale. He then must fight to survive and escape the giant creature’s stomach.

“A whale would never swallow a human on purpose. So what happens is really the only thing that could happen, which is that Jay gets entangled with a giant squid,” says Kraus. “And the giant squid is what whales eat all day long. So he’s essentially pulled into the stomach with the squid.”

Whalefall | Official Trailer | In Theaters October 16

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Kraus worked with a team of scientists to represent whale anatomy as accurately as possible. One of the most important pieces of information he learned was that most whales can’t swallow a human due to the size of their throats.

Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, explains that there are two main categories of whales: baleen and toothed. The humpback is one of the former, using baleen plates to sieve prey—typically small fish and crustaceans—from the water. The sperm whale is the largest of the toothed cetaceans and consumes giant squid, its main prey. Pyenson, who was not involved in the making of the novel or the film, notes that whales don’t usually chew their food. While some do have teeth, they are “pretty much just for grabbing and holding their food,” he says.

Because the massive sperm whales live and hunt in the deep ocean, the specificities of their feeding practices have been difficult to clearly observe, but they are generally acknowledged by scientists as suction feeders.

Pyenson describes the difference between the two whale types in relation to the idea of being swallowed by them: “When you’re swallowed by a baleen whale, you are not going down the esophagus. You’re kind of stuck in the mouth.” But for the purposes of a story like Whalefall, in which a person is fully engulfed, a toothed whale makes the most sense. “If your plot is for humans to be swallowed by a whale, you want to go for the biggest toothed whale,” Pyenson says. “And sperm whales are the largest toothed whale ever.”

When sperm whales are eating, the curator explains, they create a small vacuum in the back of their throat to suck in their giant squid dinner. By selecting the sperm whale for his novel, Pyenson adds, “the author has done his work; just the diameter of a human is not far off from the diameter of a giant squid. And you know this, because if you go into the Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian, you can lie right next to a giant squid [preserved specimen] in a tank, and it is just about small to mid-sized human.”

Though the scenario that plays out for Jay is “highly unlikely,” the power of storytelling is such that it’s meant to feel real, emotionally, in Kraus’ novel and in the film. In the movie, production designers worked hard to make it look real too. Whalefall is ultimately the story of a father and son, told through the belly of a beast.

While whale anatomy helps support the plot of the novel and film, it also adds significance to the title itself. Once a whale dies and sinks to the seafloor, its carcass becomes an ecological phenomenon known as a “whale fall.” The whale’s skeleton turns into a deep-sea ecosystem, providing a habitat and a source of food sustaining the lives of other creatures.

Kraus, who co-wrote the script of the movie adaptation with Duffield, finds a special meaning in this occurrence, which led to the title of the book.

When a whale dies, it creates a “burst of life,” Kraus says. “And I really liked that idea about when people die. You know, it doesn’t have to be a whale. It can be a person. When a person dies, what they meant to people works in a sort of similar way to a whale fall, or we are the whale fall of all of our loved ones, in a way.”

Kunjal Bastola is an editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.