The Whale

(In theaters now)

Brendan Fraser in 'The Whale'

Brendan Fraser makes an emotional comeback in 'The Whale'

| Credit: A24

Filmmaker Darren Aronofskyhas been vocal about the fact that he spent the last decade trying to bring Samuel D. Hunter's play about a man too morbidly obese to leave his home to the screen. Why the director who helmed Black Swan, The Wrestler, and Requiem for a Dream would find a psychological drama about deeply broken people appealing is not a mystery; it's less easy to see what he found irresistible in a melodrama so masochistic and stagy it often feels less like a movie than an endurance test, or even worse, a parody.

Brendan Fraser — encased in elaborate prosthetics that Aronfosky revels in shooting like a Caravaggio, all shadows and moody, milky light — is Charlie, whom we first meet as a disembodied voice inside a Zoom screen. That's because he teaches remotely at an online college, but his excuse of a broken laptop camera is a ruse: The truth is he can't leave his shabby apartment or even stand up without a walker. He can just about manage to bathe and feed himself, but other activities (masturbation, laughing) leave him too clammy and winded to breathe.

Liz (Watchmen's Hong Chau), a friend who comes faithfully every day to check his vitals and bring him groceries, is also a nurse, and she keeps telling him plainly that he's dying. But she's often interrupted by a knock at the door: First an earnest young missionary (Ty Simpkins) hoping to spread the good word, and later, Ellie (Stranger Things' Sadie Sink), his estranged teenage daughter whose only words for him, primarily, are sneered f-bombs. Hissing and venomous, Ellie hates him because he left her mother (Samantha Morton) years ago for another man, but mainly she hates everything.