Killer Whale Review: Animal Captivity Themes Drain the Film’s Survival-Horror Tension

Since Jaws’s transgenerational success, ocean predators have become a staple of Hollywood’s aquatic horror, with most films fetishizing sharks and orcas as man-killers despite crocodiles, elephants, and hippopotamuses accounting for far more human fatalities annually.

The commercial success of these movies largely accounts for their sub-genre-affirming influence, programming audiences to relish blood-in-the-water survival thrills. Killer Whale, an offshoot of this trope, is a solid foundation for a more creative exploration. Orcas are highly intelligent mammals, making them ideal candidates for a more psychologically driven predator.

Unfortunately, Killer Whale squanders this premise with functional but inert writing and a storyline too cautious to exploit its own psychological potential. Writer-director Jo-Anne Brechin's stance on wildlife captivity permeates the film, inexorably softening the survival thriller's intensity.

Killer Whale Lacks the Critical Bite Needed for an Aquatic Survival Thriller

Killer Whale aims to be a bloodcurdling thriller, but it is hampered by self-imposed constraints that prevent it from achieving its central goal. Opening with two deaths that set a grim tone, the movie revolves around two friends: Maddie (Virginia Garner), who lost her boyfriend to a robbery, and Trish (Mel Jarnson), the reassuring friend who wants to brighten Maddie's gloomy life with a retreat.

However, the adventure on a private lagoon hosts the movie’s eponymous terror: a vengeful orca who has been in captivity for over 20 years and has every reason to despise and attack humans. The “Killer Whale” Ceto represents director Jo-Anne Brechin’s didacticism against wildlife captivity, absolving the creature of blame while positioning humans as the primary antagonists.

While this approach adds an empathetic tone to the film, it deprioritizes the intensity befitting of a survival thriller. Better suited to a title like "Whales in Captivity", Killer Whale plays less like a survival thriller than a cautionary parable. There’s nothing exceptional about the film except its orca-themed premise, which can also be linked to the Orca (1977) and Attack of the Killer Whales in terms of originality.

Where most ecological horror favors spectacle to sustain tension, Killer Whale prioritizes character introspection at the expense of momentum and threat escalation.The film intertwines a tepid twist with its Orca’s attacks, leaning heavily on Garner’s performance. What is meant to deepen the Maddie-Trish dynamic instead drains the film of urgency, culminating in an anticlimactic reveal that undercuts the retreat’s original purpose.

For an animal whose revered trait is intelligence, the movie’s depiction of a calculating orca attack is underwhelming and exhausting to watch. Killer Whale would benefit more from featuring a scheming orca with unpredictable attack patterns that heighten the film’s terror elements and shock value. On the contrary, the film’s animal horror ends up as a Jaws-esque imitation that gestures toward brutality without ever delivering the ingenuity expected of an intelligent apex predator.

Ultimately, Brechin appears less interested in crafting a vicious aquatic thriller than in condemning the cruelty of animal captivity. While Killer Whale succeeds as a somber meditation on that subject, it falters as a survival film, offering too little spectacle, tension, or invention to justify its genre trappings.