The Pestle: In-depth Movie Talk, No Fluff | Film Review | Spoilers
Oct 20, 2026 · 58 min · 13 segments
**We devour Brian Duffield’s “Whalefall” and discuss:** - Cinematography, visual storytelling; - Story & Writing, memory lane as exposition; - and other such stuff and things and stuff. > *“Life is…
So you and I have been eyeballing this release for probably six months or whenever that first trailer dropped.
And that's a long time to build up a lot of expectation.
How did it go? Did this live up to what you hoped?
Not quite.
You know, I will say...
It's not that I wasn't stressed.
It did its job in being stressful.
But keep in mind, I'm terrified of this kind of thing.
So just like the ocean in general.
And when he goes scuba diving and he's sitting on the edge of the crevasse or whatever it is, I don't know, of the drop off.
I'm just like...
Having a heart attack in the theater, you know, just...
I was losing my mind.
And then as the squid...
I'm just... why are you down there and i knew what was going to happen you know i knew i knew because i obviously you know i knew what this is about i'd seen the seen the trailer um and in the trailer this happens um they don't mince any words in fact one of the reasons why i think that the trailer is so great is because you see it happen but you know this is part of the story and you're thinking well he gets swallowed what's the rest of the story like and then you're thinking well i mean He can't.
The story isn't he gets swallowed and dies.
Right.
Like that's hardly a story.
So what is going what's going on? So I'll start with the things that I thought were good.
I thought that I can see this being a really good book.
I haven't read it, but I could imagine reading this as a book and thinking, man, this would be a great movie, honestly.
But I think that it just kind of didn't complete...
It wasn't executed in a way that I think it needed to be executed in.
So...
So you and I have been eyeballing this release for probably six months or whenever that first trailer dropped.
And that's a long time to build up a lot of expectation.
How did it go? Did this live up to what you hoped?
Not quite.
You know, I will say...
It's not that I wasn't stressed.
It did its job in being stressful.
But keep in mind, I'm terrified of this kind of thing.
So just like the ocean in general.
And when he goes scuba diving and he's sitting on the edge of the crevasse or whatever it is, I don't know, of the drop off.
I'm just like...
Having a heart attack in the theater, you know, just...
I was losing my mind.
And then as the squid...
I'm just... why are you down there and i knew what was going to happen you know i knew i knew because i obviously you know i knew what this is about i'd seen the seen the trailer um and in the trailer this happens um they don't mince any words in fact one of the reasons why i think that the trailer is so great is because you see it happen but you know this is part of the story and you're thinking well he gets swallowed what's the rest of the story like and then you're thinking well i mean He can't.
The story isn't he gets swallowed and dies.
Right.
Like that's hardly a story.
So what is going what's going on? So I'll start with the things that I thought were good.
I thought that I can see this being a really good book.
I haven't read it, but I could imagine reading this as a book and thinking, man, this would be a great movie, honestly.
But I think that it just kind of didn't complete...
It wasn't executed in a way that I think it needed to be executed in.
So...
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
