“The Whale” is a Melodramatic Punchline to Darren Aronofsky’s Career

The “Black Swan” director’s latest controversial film is drowning in overwrought artifice

Darren Aronofsky’s latest dive into human misery is confined to an 4:3 aspect ratio, the classic box that is once again commonplace in modern indie filmmaking. And just like this visually confining ratio, The Whale is constructed in such a creatively confining way that any genuine attempts at emotional vulnerability from the cast lose an uphill battle against an overly contrived film drenched in artifice. 

Like much of Aronofsky’s work, The Whale’s release was not without controversy, this time surrounding the ethics of the portrayal of the main character. The film is neatly structured as a day-by-day account of Charlie’s (Brendan Fraser) “last week to live,” a morbid assessment made by his nurse and friend, Liz (Hong Chau) following a heart attack for which Charlie refuses to seek treatment, citing his fear of medical debt. We watch Charlie, a reclusive English teacher immobilized by obesity, try to repair his relationship with his daughter during his final days in this adaptation from a play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter. 

The controversial response to the film was largely due to Aronofsky’s style of body horror and how his morbid grotesqueness works in the context of depicting the suffering of a man with a very real and debilitating disease. But I am not particularly concerned with the semantics of whether this film’s portrayal is respectful or not because The Whale is so overwhelmingly artificial. It posits itself as an examination of honesty, optimism, and humanity, but everything about the film is outlandishly mediocre, especially its allegories and its screenplay. 

Charlie’s frequent exclamations that “people are amazing!” and to “give me something honest” are undercut by the inorganic and manipulative direction and writing. Aronofsky’s flair for melodramatic miserabilism (though well suited for surrealism), slices through the film’s genuinely emotional moments with histrionic arrogance, all emphasized with whatever overbearing and forgettable melodies Rob Simonsen pulls from the strings in his original score. 

However, The Whale is not without worthwhile concepts. Ideas of body image, sexuality, religion, family, and self loathing are all present but feel twisted and manipulative, designed to draw a tear or two from the audience but provide no lasting material for real contemplation. Aronofsky takes any semblance of raw humanity and pushes it through a lens of either overwrought grotesqueness or melodramatic wallowing, relegating each moment to the realm of cliche symbolism. Brendan Fraser and Hong Chau channel genuine pain in their performances, but the actors are underutilized and their performances are whittled down to unrecognizably robotic and overproduced imaginations of humanity. Even the final emotional breaking point of The Whale reads more as a punchline than a profound conclusion, solidifying it as an artificial, ingenuine, and robotic account of human emotion. 

OVERALL SCORE: 5/10

The Whale was released on December 9, 2022 and is currently in US theaters.