If Santa were a hipster (which, let's face it, if he lived in Austin he would be), his life would undoubtedly be filled with free range reindeer, pedicab rides around East Austin and time spent hanging out with his rescue dog.
In honor of its 20th anniversary, local advertising agency Door Number 3 has created "Hipster Santa Goes South," a parody about all the things we love to love (and love to talk about) in Austin.
This rendition features a scruffy, bespectacled Santa (played to perfection by Bill Wise) who prefers soy milk and gluten-free cookies to the traditional Christmas Eve snacks. He's also into cleanses — just "not this time of year." Hipster Santa enjoys hanging out at the Longbranch Inn and Kenny Dorham's Backyard, and prefers shopping for vinyl at local record stores.
Sitting atop his reclaimed sled, "which runs on penguin tears and Santa sweat," Hipster Santa strokes his rescue dog and tells a passerby, "I've made my list and checked it twice — you still have to move back to California."
For Door Number 3, the video is a celebration of two decades of work with such clients as Birds Barbershop, Austin Humane Society and the Austin Film Festival. "Chest thumping around anniversaries just leaves us with sore pecs. So, to commemorate, we did something different," writes the firm.
Austin Abrams has been a professional actor for 15 years, but the 30-year-old seems to just now be getting his due. After years of mostly supporting roles in films like Paper Towns, Brad’s Status, and Weapons, he has been charged with leading two films in 2026 where he’s largely acting by himself: First Resident Evil and now Whalefall.
Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, who has returned home to California a year after the death of his hard-ass father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). The two had a tempestuous relationship, and while his mom (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd) reminisce fondly about him, Jay finds it difficult to come up with good memories. The two did share a connection with the ocean, and Jay decides to honor him by going scuba diving.
Ignoring warnings of whale activity in the area, Jay makes his way out into a notoriously dangerous part of the ocean near their home. Soon after he starts swimming, he encounters a sperm whale chasing after a giant squid. Jay inadvertently gets sucked into the enormous creature’s mouth and, ultimately, inside its body. Faced with a seemingly inescapable situation, Jay’s only hope lies in the lessons his father taught him.
Directed by Brian Duffield and adapted by Duffield and Daniel Kraus from Kraus’ book of the same name, the film is at its best when it depicts Jay struggling to survive within the whale. The claustrophobic nature of the setting and the various obstacles (multiple contracting chambers, the squid, and more) he faces make every scene inside the whale feel as intense and cover-your-eyes scary as any great horror movie.
Naturally, the entire movie can’t be about his survival efforts, and so the filmmakers toggle back and forth between Jay’s ordeal in the whale to memories of times with his father. Not so coincidentally, these remembrances come with subtle or overt wisdom from Mitt that would serve Jay well in his current situation. More often than not, these flashback scenes are so on-the-nose that they come off as cheesy instead of inspirational.
It’s also difficult to derive any big emotions from the story other than revulsion at the way Jay’s body is brutalized while he’s inside the whale. None of the characters in the film receive a notable introduction to the audience before big events start happening. It’s next-to-impossible to be invested in their stories when their personalities are being revealed in bits and pieces throughout the movie.
Abrams does well enough in bringing out the terror Jay feels in the whale and the sullenness/anger he has toward his father in other scenes. But whether it’s because his lines in the whale are hard to understand (he’s often talking around a scuba mouthpiece) or the disconnect the character has with father, there’s just something missing in his performance. Brolin’s performance is one-note, and Shue, Levy, Rudd, and John Ortiz don’t appear enough to make a big impact.
With Kraus onboard as the co-writer of the film, it may be the case that Duffield was not given leeway to change the story of Whalefall too much. What might have worked in the book doesn’t seem to translate equally to the film, and while Jay’s nightmare in the whale is effective, the rest of his story doesn’t come across as successfully.
