Killer Whale review: A micro-thriller that should be better (or worse)

We've seen a good run of effective micro-thrillers in recent years. Unfortunately, this creature feature doesn't qualify.

It’s happened just often enough that it might start to look easy: An unambitious B-movie with a story hook that’s simple bordering on ridiculous premieres without much hype, and yields a highly satisfying 90 minutes or so. Movies like Crawl (swimmer fights alligators during a hurricane!), The Shallows (surfer stranded by a shark attack!), Fall (two women stuck very, very high up!), and, just recently, Primate (rabid ape attacks!) exploit their cheap-thrills premises with such gratifying, surprising skill that they can leave viewers feeling reinvigorated: The recipes have remained intact! People still know how to make fun small-scale thrillers!

This also makes the environment more perilous for a movie like Killer Whale, which swims into the waters of bluntly titled horror-thrillers with clear evidence that the filmmakers are at least partially aware of the previous successes they’re emulating. With so many similar movies close at hand, though, Killer Whale’s problems become more glaring.

For fans of micro-thrillers, this one starts with a happy glimmer of recognition: Virginia Gardner, who starred as one of the two women stuck on a radio tower in Fall, again plays half of an imperiled female best-friend duo. She flips the script from Fall, where she was the devil-may-care YouTuber wheedling her still-grieving friend into a risky climbing expedition. Here, her character Maddie is the grieving party. Maddie, a budding cellist and part-time waitress, loses her boyfriend unexpectedly, because director and co-writer Jo-Anne Brechin seems to know that every imperiled-then-empowered young woman needs a tragic backstory to overcome.

The way Maddie’s loss is staged, however, is the first warning sign that all is not right with Killer Whale. An armed man bursts into a restaurant where Maddie works, attempting to rob the place as she’s closing up. Chad (Isaac Crawley) nobly and stupidly tries to stop him, miraculously avoids death, and is then dispatched with the misplaced punchiness of a Final Destination movie. (Brechin makes it worse, and more unintentionally punchline-y, by repeatedly cutting back to it elsewhere in the film.) A year later, Maddie’s best friend Trish (Melanie Jarnson) shows up and insists on taking her to Thailand for a vacation.

There are moments, early on, when it seems like Killer Whale might work out OK. When Maddie, Trish, and Trish’s new squeeze Josh (Mitchell Hope) break into a run-down marine park to get a look at a killer whale in captivity, the nighttime neon-lit set looks so cool that you might not stop to wonder why the characters are all barefoot. (OK, you probably will. The park is near the water, but their plan to see it is premeditated, and all of the walkways are concrete. Why would they uniformly ditch their shoes?!)

Maddie’s history with Ceto the whale is also confusing. She apparently shared that interest with Chad; both of them wanted to go see him, but she’s also highly aware of, and disturbed by, the fact that the animal is clearly mistreated at the facility. (Maybe Chad had a Free Willy scheme up his sleeve that Maddie doesn’t mention.) Why Trish sees this particular trip as a make-good for her bestie is murky at best. In any event, Maddie, Trish, and Josh later set out for a day trip to a secluded lagoon, and guess who has recently escaped captivity and meets them there? And guess which barefoot dummies get trapped out on a rock without cell phones handy?

From this point, Killer Whale is basically The Shallows with an interpersonal dynamic clumsily stolen from Fall. It’s The Shallow Fall. The filmmakers fail to realize that in this situation, they need to pick either green-screened locations or chintzy creature effects — or if they’re really lucky, neither. “Both” is not an option, and that’s just what Killer Whale ends up with. The whale looks fake, the sky behind the characters looks fake, and the tensions that develop between Maddie and Trish feel fake. There’s nothing to latch onto beyond the fact that Gardner remains a charming presence, if seemingly not quite capable of the quickly sketched intensity Blake Lively brought to The Shallows or Kaya Scodelario brought to Crawl.

Those movies have some light thematic connection between their fearsome animals and their fearful-then-determined humans. It’s not rich stuff, but it gets the B-movie job done. Brechin and co-writer Katharine E. McPhee (not the singer) never figure out what a killer whale really has to do with a grieving cellist, even nominally. As a result, when Maddie shares a quiet moment with the creature and muses that they both feel trapped — supposedly Ceto is lashing out because he doesn’t realize he’s actually escaped captivity — nothing snaps into place. It’s somehow simultaneously too literal and too metaphorical. There’s nothing primal about reskinning a majestic, enormous whale as a less scary-looking shark of indeterminate size. Ceto has as much implied personality as the tower from Fall.

Granted, some viewers may not hold out high hopes for a killer whale movie showing primarily on VOD, and might just assume it'll be enjoyably crazy-campy schlock. But Killer Whale isn’t that either. It’s no better than it needs to be, and it’s not bad enough to be consistently laughable, either. Fans of this kind of thriller have been well-served lately, so it’s important to be clear. There’s a good new women-versus-nature micro-thriller out right now, and that movie is Primate. Killer Whale, sadly, winds up dead in the water.

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Killer Whale debuts on VOD and in select theaters Jan. 16.