Although they'll likely be a little reluctant to admit it, a formative experience for almost all men, at one time or another, is taking part in a group debate over which animals they could theoretically beat in a fight. These debates commonly take place around a campfire or at a lunch table, fueled by a mixture of alcohol, ego, and stupidity. They start at the bottom of the food chain and work their way up. Fish? Obviously, I eat a bottomless amount of those during Lent. Eagle? Would be a vicious fight with a lot of cuts and scrapes, but a good punch could do it. Kangaroo? Like boxing, they’d have to be in my weight class. Bear? Absolutely not. I’ve seen The Revenant.

Of course, the debate usually stops just before you reach the apex predators. At that point, it becomes a question of survival rather than winning. How long could you last going toe-to-toe with nature’s dominant hunters? A whale is one of the largest animals ever to exist, with calls louder than a jet engine and speeds of over 40 mph. Sperm whales are the largest of all whale species, weighing over 45 tons. No wonder Captain Ahab was obsessed with hunting down Moby Dick. And now, through the power of IMAX visuals and soundscapes, Whalefall offers modern audiences an opportunity to literally venture into the belly of the beast.

But before we can dive into the ocean, we must first learn how a landdweller could convince themselves to get their feet in the water. Jay Gardiner (Austin Abrams) has a whale of a dad in the form of Mitt (Josh Brolin), an intense diver who never stops pushing his son to become a man and take on the world. It’s all rather vague machismo, brazenly expressed as if there’s a dark force to be conquered in life. There’s also always a connection to the ocean, specifically to how whales are harbingers of life throughout the aquatic world.

The opening of Whalefalls makes it clear that Jay no longer has a father; he had one. Stubborn against treatments and pills for his assumed serious illness, the old man decided to bury his body at sea, the place he was truly happy. Returning home from college in Iowa, the most landlocked and whale-free state in the country, Jay can’t help but feel compelled to get in the water and search for his dad’s remains. Putting on that diving tank again, he feels the cumulative weight of all those years of his dad drilling home the essentials to surviving out of your element.

However, what his dad never taught him was how to survive being swallowed whole by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale. Apart from Jonah in the Bible, it’s probably not been common enough for even the most amphibious humans to imagine. Director Brian Duffield weaponizes his entire production arsenal to illustrate the terror of this scenario. The theater shakes intensely as the whale passes by, the entire area handcuffed to its movements. There is no escaping its sight and grasp, with echolocation calls piercing the dark depths.

Once inside, Jay experiences a lot of wincing moments. His bones crunch as he’s being chewed up within one of the beast’s lower mouths. He makes his way to the stomach, a cavernous area that bellows and continually fills with the carcasses of freshly caught prey. They’re all bathed in oozing acid, burning holes in Jay’s clothes and equipment. Both the figurative pressure of his dwindling oxygen and the literal pressure of the ocean depths fracture his psyche, allowing for several moments where we flashback to his fraught relationship with his father.

Those moments of claustrophobic freedom don’t offer the intended relief. They are heavy-handed, accented by Joseph Trapanese’s epic score and Pietro Scalia’s intense editing. Then again, a movie about a being swallowed by a whale has no business being small, so this oversized swing for the heartstrings is par for the course. Abrams is an extremely talented up-and-comer, his skinny frame and natural vulnerability giving way to complimentary comparisons to Timothée Chalamet. It is a little too bad he’s forced to “charm” the audience by talking to himself throughout his escape, a character trait that annoyed me here just as much as it did throughout all of Project Hail Mary.

Whalefall likely won’t do for whales as Jaws did for sharks. That’s probably a good thing, as whales are too endangered and important to the natural order of things for us to develop an irrational fear of them. But I’m still fine staying here in the Midwest, where I can’t find myself getting hands-on experience with that survival debate.

20th Century Studios will release Whalefall in theaters nationwide on October 16th.