Killer Whale Review: Free Willy, Free Us

The creature feature is a genre that lives or dies by its creature. You can have cardboard characters, a script held together with duct tape, and locations that scream “blue screen,” but if the monster delivers, audiences will forgive almost anything. Killer Whale makes the fatal mistake of barely featuring its killer whale at all, and what we do see isn’t worth the wait.

Maddie (Virginia Gardner, Fall) is a cellist recovering from a tragedy that left her with hearing loss and survivor’s guilt. Her best friend Trish (Mel Jarnson, Witchboard and the upcoming Street Fighter) surprises her with a luxury trip to Thailand, where a drunken break-in at a marine park puts them face-to-fin with Ceto, a captive orca. When Ceto later turns up in the secluded lagoon where the friends are vacationing, things turn deadly. On paper, this should work. Two women trapped by an apex predator seeking revenge for years of captivity has the makings of a tense survival thriller.

The problem is that director Jo-Anne Brechin and co-writer Katharine McPhee (no, not that Katharine McPhee) seem to have had two different movies in mind. There’s a drama here about friendship and betrayal, complete with a late-game revelation about Trish that’s meant to reframe everything. And there’s a creature feature that promises orca attacks. Neither gets enough attention to succeed. The exposition dump explaining Ceto’s backstory is delivered with all the grace of someone reading from cue cards, and the coincidences required to strand these women in the same lagoon as the whale are so clumsy you’ll wonder if anyone bothered to proofread.

Gardner and Jarnson do their best with what they’re given. The two have solid chemistry as friends, and there are moments where you can see the better film they thought they were making. Gardner commits fully to Maddie’s arc, and Jarnson is game for everything the script throws at her, including a gruesome third-act departure that she sells with gusto. But they’re stranded (pun intended) in long stretches without any orca to interact with, left to play out dramatic scenes while their shoulders crisp and blister in the sun. The redder their skin gets, the lower your eyelids will go.

The last film to center on an orca was 1977’s Orca, an equally troubled production that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be a poetic retelling of Moby Dick or a cheap revenge tale. That film at least had a grandstanding Richard Harris, a beautiful Bo Derek, and Ennio Morricone’s gorgeous score. Killer Whale has Angela Little‘s music, which sounds pulled from a stock catalog. Cinematographer Shing Fung Cheung does what he can, but it’s obvious much of this was shot in a blue screen tank rather than sunny Thailand. Editor Ahmad Halimi fails to give the film any shape, including one baffling sequence where we see the women facing away from a rock, only to cut to them paddling forward and somehow arriving at the rock behind them.

There is one genuinely creative visual: because orcas’ dorsal fins often droop in captivity, the filmmakers use that bent fin as a viewfinder, framing victims through the curved space as the whale approaches. It’s a technique borrowed from Jaws 2, and it’s one of the few moments where the film shows any craft.

Films like The Shallows and Crawl proved this formula can still deliver thrills when executed well. Killer Whale has the species novelty going for it, but shoddy effects, slack pacing, and a creature that barely shows up sink whatever potential existed. This is one you shouldn’t bother to reel in.