Dir: Darren Aronofsky
Cast: Brendan Fraser, Sadie Sink, Hong Chau, Ty Simpkins, Samantha Morton
117 mins

A bereft Charlie (Fraser) has become a recluse. With his best friend (Hong Chau) his only contact with the outside world, Charlie is eating himself into an early grave. His health failing, he reaches out to the daughter (Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink) he abandoned when he fell in love with a man and left his wife.

The Whale is adapted by Samuel D. Hunter from his own stage play, and Aronofsky directs with consummate economy. Unfolding in a single room, the film has a rich sense of place – the dusty American mid-west, with its church-dictated hetero-norms of family love and a booming medical sector as a primary employer. But its themes are universal: our fundamental need for human connection, a sense that time is unforgiving, and the (occasionally awful) power and responsibility of parenting and being someone’s whole world. With exquisite writing and pitch-perfect performances – Fraser and Sink are particular knockouts – The Whale is destined to be one of the talking-point films of the year.

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