A Massachusetts diver who once found himself trapped inside a whale’s mouth now has a movie that hits uncomfortably close to home. Michael Packard survived being briefly swallowed off Cape Cod, and when he sat down to watch the new film Whalefall, he said he could “totally relate” to what he saw on screen.
Packard was 56 when he went into the water for his second dive of the morning near Herring Cove Beach. He was looking for lobsters when a sudden impact left him surrounded by darkness.
“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” he recalled. Inside the whale’s mouth, he felt its muscles squeezing him and thought about his wife and their two sons, then 12 and 15.
Eventually the whale carried him toward the surface, where it shook its head until Packard could see daylight again.
The memory stayed vivid enough that even the film’s trailer gave him “shiver bumps.” To ease what the movie might bring back, he had a few beers before watching it. Packard saw Whalefall at a preview screening in New York City’s Times Square alongside stars Austin Abrams and Josh Brolin.
The film tells a fictional story drawn from Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel, rather than Packard’s experience. Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, a diver swallowed by a sperm whale who has to find a way out.
Still, the parallels were striking for Packard. “He was there where the tongue was contracting, and I could feel the tongue of my whale contracting on me, and the movements of this giant animal, so I could totally relate,” he said afterward.
Whalefall opens in theaters October 16.
