From the Book of Jonah to Jaws, people have always tested, found, and come to understand their essential humanity in the bosom of the sea, often at odds with the mighty creatures that lurk within. Whalefall, based on the book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daniel Kraus, continues this tradition, spinning a pulpy premise into a harrowing tale of survival.

Brian Duffield’s film opens with a suicide. Mitt Gardner (Josh Brolin), dying from mesothelioma, takes his own life by flinging himself overboard off the coast of Monterey while fishing one afternoon with his best friend, Huey (John Ortiz). Sometime later, his estranged son, Jay (Austin Abrams), comes home to join his mother (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd) in paying respects. Really, though, the young man has returned on a mad mission to retrieve his father’s unrecovered remains from the sea.

As Jay dives into the watery depths of the Pacific Ocean, he encounters a giant squid pursued by a hungry sperm whale and, in a freak occurrence, winds up swallowed whole alongside the dangerous cephalopod. Stuck in the belly of the 40-ton beast with just one hour of air left in his scuba tank, Jay must find a way out before he’s digested or suffocates.

Whalefall is the second film in a mere couple of months in which Abrams is tasked with holding the screen for the majority of the runtime on his own. With little to support him but his own charisma and special effects, the actor proves a disarming screen presence as his character is put through the wringer. Whether Jay is screaming in agony, befriending a jellyfish, or murmuring to himself through his breathing apparatus, Abrams is never anything less than riveting.

Jay is a different character from the snarky jabberjaw Abrams played in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil: a young man locked in a state of shellshock, not just by Mitt’s death, but by having grown up as a scrawny disappointment, constantly buffeted against the tide of his father’s destructive will. Brolin ably plays a recalcitrant salty dog ill-adjusted to life on land, and the complexities of Mitt’s relationship with Jay, revealed in flashbacks, give Whalefall a muscular, bruised emotionality beautifully tied to the poetic absurdities of the central scenario.

This may be the most stiflingly claustrophobic film since Neil Marshall’s The Descent. The sperm whale’s interior is an organic torture chamber, with walls of pulverizing mucosa and burning lakes of digestive goo to contend with, while outside Jay’s fleshy prison, other cetaceans cut across the screen like sci-fi frigates zooming through the blackness of space.

Kraus’s story takes an impossible scenario and roots it in the technical realities of diving. Like all the best speculative fiction, Whalefall builds its what-ifs from a foundation of fact to better support its more poetic strains as it reaches its heart-swelling climax. As the world literally closes in on Jay and nitrogen narcosis takes effect, the film shifts into an increasingly surreal register, where memory bleeds into the present and human and animal consciousness intersect.

The title comes from the natural phenomenon in which a whale carcass, upon falling to the sea floor, creates an entire ecosystem that can feed thousands of organisms for decades. Appropriately, this tender fable about fathers and sons isn’t about salvaging the unsalvageable, but about how the wreckage of one life may be the raw material that allows another to flourish.