// NATURE NEWS — SPAZIO & SCIENZA
Can a human survive in a whale’s belly? The science behind the thriller Whalefall
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In the film Whalefall, Jay Gardiner (played by Austin Abrams) attempts to escape a sperm whale that has swallowed him. Credit: 20th Century Studios/Everett Collection
The new film Whalefall, released on 16 October, takes viewers into the belly of the beast — quite literally. The survival thriller, based on Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel, follows university student Jay Gardiner (played by Austin Abrams) as he is accidentally swallowed by a sperm whale while scuba diving. Viewers watch with apprehension as Jay treks through the whale’s multi-chambered stomach, looking desperately for a way out — all while reckoning with the anniversary of his father’s death.
The making of both the novel and its subsequent film relied heavily on collaboration with scientific advisors. One of them — Joy Reidenberg, a comparative anatomist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City — says she and the storytellers discussed everything from what whale species would work best for the “modern-day Jonah” story to what damage Jay might incur while inside various stomach chambers.
Here, Nature speaks to Reidenberg and Ilias Foskolos, who researches deep-diving toothed whales at both Aarhus University in Denmark and Stanford University in California, to help separate science from fiction.
Foskolos: There are a few problems with this. Sperm whales are usually not in coastal areas. They’re oceanic predators. They won’t feed on something that is at shallow depths. Most evidence from sperm whale stomach contents suggests that they consume quite small prey. They consume mostly squid of about 30 to 40 centimetres long — so nothing even close to a person’s size. Sometimes they go for bigger squid, but that’s not very common.
Reidenberg: Sperm whales don’t have much of a mouth to carry anything. But the throat passageway is actually quite large. And if it’s a very large sperm whale, which is the premise for this movie and for the book, then it’s physically possible. Behaviourally, could this ever happen?
You have to realize that the premise of the whole thing is that this sperm whale is pulling [Jay] in accidentally [with a squid]. If you were eating a gummy bear, and someone put a pebble next to it and you put the pebble in your mouth with the gummy bear, you'd probably spit everything back out again because that’s not really what you want to eat. So how likely is it for a sperm whale to ingest a human? About as likely as you are to ingest a rock.
During the film, Jay grabs a glowing jellyfish that was also swallowed by the whale to light his way as he looks for an exit.Credit: 20th Century Studios/Everett Collection
Reidenberg: I think so, if they had enough of the right protection.