Spare a thought for poor Austin Abrams, who, having just endured the world's worst, and gloopiest, courier assignment in Resident Evil, has now been trapped inside a sperm whale …

The immensely likable Euphoria alum (has any show in recent memory provided quite as many genuine stars?) brings what he can to Brian Duffield's rather soggy adaptation of Pulitzer prize-winner Daniel Kraus's acclaimed novel Whalefall. But there's not a great deal he do, despite being in every scene of what's his second studio lead in a month, other than scream and writhe and look understandably alarmed. It's a setup that's grabby enough to have us wonder just how the hell it's going to play out (what if that one scene in Finding Nemo but a whole movie) but it just doesn't work as a 106-minute adventure, too overstretched and too silly to have us rooting for his escape and caring how he might orchestrate it.

There is something charmingly ambitious about a writer choosing to write himself into a corner, making an already hard job even harder, because while Kraus could clue readers into his protagonist's inner thoughts and fears, Duffield decides against the easier choice of a voiceover. In order to keep the scenario as grounded as possible, Abrams' unfortunate hero Jay is also unable to remove his breathing apparatus as the air inside the whale is toxic so whatever talking he might do is muffled through a mouthpiece. The authenticity is applaudable but it's just one of many decisions that makes it harder to justify and enjoy the stage-to-screen adaptation, our connection to his plight hard to solidify.

We learn more about Jay via a series of flashbacks, fleshing out his relationship to a gruff and difficult father (Josh Brolin), who recently chose killing himself in the ocean rather than dying slowly of mesothelioma, a rare cancer. Jay is determined to find his body, for reasons never quite fully explained, and after he's trapped inside a whale, he looks back on their fractured dynamic, usefully accompanied by nuggets of diving wisdom from his father. Jay has something to prove (his mostly awful-seeming dad tells him he has "soft lungs") and so his journey out of the beast is one that also aims to show what he can do by himself.

Duffield's scripts can often feel like pitches that are more sellable in an elevator than films that are watchable on the big screen, and while Whalefall might be his first adaptation, it suffers from the same disappointing follow-through. There was The Babysitter (what if your babysitter was a devil-worshipper), Spontaneous (what if spontaneous combustion at high school), No One Will Save You (what if home invasion but aliens) and the most relevant here, Underwater (what if monsters at the bottom of the ocean). As director, he does a better job than that film's William Eubank did at capturing the majesty and terror of the water (he also only has one character to focus on and make distinguishable) but while treating the whale's body as an alien landscape is an interesting idea, it's also a limiting one.

Given this year's deluge of shark movies, Whalefall makes an admirable initial case for finding drama elsewhere in the water. The otherworldly horror of the predicament is often wincingly effective (stomach acid burning hands, a swallowed-at-the-same-time giant squid causing added tentacled mayhem) and the film has a slick studio sheen that can be that much harder to find these days. But there are only so many set pieces that can take place in such a setting and only so much problem-solving that can be made legible without real dialogue. These scenes might get repetitive and viscerally unpleasant, yet they are at least more striking than the hopelessly rote and uninvolving father-son flashbacks that fail to add any real emotion or stakes to the story. What could have been a lean, mean 85-minute race to survive becomes weighed down by CW network-level soap, and Duffield never makes a decision we don't already expect (his influences for the film, a list that bizarrely includes Brokeback Mountain, A Little Prayer, JFK and West Side Story, fail to add any personality to the finished product). A final hallucinatory chat is also laughably ineffective as dead father asks potentially dying son the questions he always wanted to know (spoiler: they include "did you ever want a dog?"). Abrams is an actor who has become incredibly easy to root for, but he struggles to make his scenes with Brolin feel like anything other than treading water (I would have liked to see more of the forever underused Elisabeth Shue as his mother).

Flipping between a family drama of soul-searching and hackneyed advice-giving ("Survivors survive!") and the more immediate 4DX-suited rush of thrashing, squelching, splashing and panicking makes Whalefall a disorienting and frustrating experience, like someone switching channels without your permission. You'll want to grab the remote and watch something else entirely.

• Whalefall is out in Australian cinemas on 15 October and in the US and UK on 16 October