Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale is an act of hate disguised as tough love

polygon.com:

Polygon has a team on the ground at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, reporting on the horror, comedy, drama, and action movies meant to dominate the cinematic conversation as we head into awards season. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s TIFF premiere.

A24’s The Whale drops all of Darren Aronofsky’s worst tendencies into a fat suit. It’s an exercise in abjection in the mode of Aronofsky’s torturous Requiem for a Dream, but it’s focused on an even more vulnerable target than Requiem’s addicts. It’s also full of the pet biblical wankery of Mother, Noah, and The Fountain, but centered on a Christ figure whose masochistic superpower is to absorb the cruelty of everyone around him and store it safely inside his massive frame.

To be fair, some people enjoy this kind of miserabilism. But these viewers are also warned that not only is this film difficult to endure and likely to be actively harmful to some audiences, it’s also a self-serving reinforcement of the status quo — which is one of the most boring things a movie can be.

For a movie that, in the most generous reading possible, encourages viewers to consider that maybe there’s a painful backstory behind bodies they consider “disgusting” (the movie’s word),The Whale seems to have little interest in the point of view of its protagonist, Charlie (Brendan Fraser). Charlie is a middle-aged divorcé living in a small apartment somewhere in Idaho, where he teaches English composition classes online. Charlie never turns his camera on during lectures, because he’s fat — very fat, around 600 pounds. Charlie has trouble getting around without a walker, and he has adaptive devices like grabber sticks stashed around his house.

If an alien landed on