Figures the best movie i see all week is the one that might sound like an Asylum turducken proposal, since it was marketed heavily on the premise of a guy scuba diving that not only sees a giant squid, but accidentally gets swalloved by a sperm whale that was hunting and already gobbled said squid, and is forced to try survive the inexpected Pinocchio style innerwhale exploration.

Sure you can word it to sound stupid and outrageous, but even without the squid it’s already a terrifying and novel premise for an underwater survival thriller, you really can’t get much more claustrophobic than the insides of a living creature, and the many moments of body horror it brings.

Yeah, there’s not too much to premise itself, that is gist, with the protagonist having just 1 hour of oxygen left to escape, but already the context makes it clear the themes underlining the spectacle of the survival itself, since the scuba diver, Jay, decides to go under in spite of everything else because he hopes to find the body of his estranged father, whom afflicted by cancer, decided to drown himself.

He wants to get closure due to the troubled relantionship he had with him even before the cancer, but in these moments of desperation, Jay recalls the many lessons his very stern father taught him (often teaching him the importance of the ocean and its creature), confronting his repressed feelings and coming to also understand – a bit more – why he was like that.

Not wholly original but its very effective, as the emotional core of the film sustains the intense, gripping and often disgusting survival, the few main characters are pretty well defined (and very well acted by Abrams and Brolin) and i feel is as long as needed.