Let me begin by adding my horn to Brendan Fraser’s well-deserved critical fanfare, because my God, what a seismic comeback this is. Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale has been the subject of much heated (and frankly, warranted) criticism since the first whispers of its production - and make no mistake, we will get to that - but since its release the one topic on which there seems to be consensus is how hard Fraser knocks it out of the park on his cinematic return. His portrayal of Charlie, a reclusive, 600 pound English teacher attempting to reconnect with his adolescent daughter against the arrhythmic ticking clock of his prolonged heart failure, is mesmerising, there’s no question. But take Fraser’s tour-de-force performance out of the equation, and The Whale begins to flounder.

We are introduced to Charlie first as a black square chairing an online writing class. Self-conscious of his appearance, he hides his true face from the students, terrified of their reactions should they discover the truth. Smash cut to the camera craning over his shoulder as he sustains a heart attack while attempting to masturbate to gay porn on his laptop. It’s safe to say a tone has been set.

Charlie has gained several hundred pounds following the death of his lover and former student Alan and is now confined to his apartment, littered with discarded pizza boxes and fried chicken buckets. Informed by his nurse and confidante Liz that he will die within the week if he doesn’t seek immediate medical attention, he refuses to go to a hospital, instead spending his final days trying to mend fences with his teenage daughter Ellie, whom he abandoned along with his wife when his affair with Alan began.

Fraser is the anchor of humanity to which The Whale is tethered. His face is so singularly expressive, his great blue eyes plaintive and desperate amid the prosthetics. He lights up at a well-written essay, at the birds he feeds on the windowsill. But in his painful hesitancy and his compulsive apologising there is also a hyper awareness of the space he occupies and a conviction that it is burdensome to those around him.

His weight is tied to his relationship with Alan, not only its tragic end but the hurt and harm he caused in pursuing it, however unintentionally. Charlie is a man desperate to see the good in people, in part because he has such difficulty seeing it in himself, and Fraser navigates this with a remarkable sensitivity and grace that the script alone does not readily give.

There is an interesting parallel too in the rotating cast of visitors to Charlie’s apartment and their varyingly sympathetic and flawed agendas. Take for example Liz, played by Hong Chau. Liz and Charlie are tightly bonded by a mutually devastating loss, and have been a source of support for each other in the time since. But this does not always manifest itself healthily; Liz is fiercely protective of Charlie to the point of treating any other presence in the apartment as a threat, and often finds herself complicit in enabling the habits that are killing him.

Each character has coping mechanisms that are arguably as harmful as Charlie’s: Ellie’s delinquency and apathy; recurring missionary Thomas’s insistence on the prevailing authority of God. But Liz is where that nuance shines brightest, in part due to being more complexly written and in part because Hong Chau imbues dialogue that could come across as overwrought in a lesser actor’s hands with a devastating believability. Her scenes with Fraser are doubtless the film’s strongest, and the most adept at communicating the film’s central themes; the corrosive nature of grief and how we cope, what we can save, and where and how those instincts can cause unintended harm.

The same can’t be said of Ellie and Thomas, who read more as types than as fleshed out figures in Charlie’s world. Sadie Sink does her best with the material she’s given, but Ellie is very much a grown man’s idea of a teenage girl - abrasive, rude and cartoonishly jaded. Her dialogue is too stagey for its setting, affected and riddled with cliché, and despite Charlie’s best efforts I cannot be convinced that there is any latent benevolence to be found in her actions. Thomas, despite an endearing performance for Ty Simpkins, is also woefully underwritten, a vehicle for Socratic dialogues about the benefits and drawbacks of religious faith that we’ve all heard countless times before. Charlie’s exchanges with them are when the script is often at its most self-serious, but that tone is ponderously spread across the whole piece, in particular in a laboured and not quite applicable Moby Dick metaphor you can practically hear Samuel D. Hunter patting himself on the back for.

Not all the blame can be laid at the feet of the script, however. With its adaptation for the screen also comes a substantial difference in the visual handling of Charlie’s weight. Where on a stage Charlie can only be seen in his entirety, here the camera has the opportunity to linger over his frame, his sweat, his exertion, in such minute detail it often comes across as leering. The muted green-blue colour palette and artificial light puts one in mind of an aquarium exhibit - tap on the glass and see if he moves! One of the main points of discussion before the film’s release was the ethics of putting a thinner actor in a fat suit when there are plenty of fat actors working who could have embodied that role. But - and take this as a criticism rather than a defense - what self respecting actor would want to put themselves through a role where their actual body is treated not only as a source of spectacle, but as a walking metaphor for giving up?

The sequences in which Charlie is at his most physically strained - choking on food with Liz pounding on his back, attempting to stand on command from a furious Ellie, binge eating until he vomits - are viscerally staged and genuinely uncomfortable to watch (I noted some sharp intakes of breath from several audience members). But it also raises the question of why in film and beyond, communicating fat characters’ humanity must so often be contingent with watching them suffer. In the world of The Whale, fatness can only ever be abject, a thing to be overcome - if I might borrow another heavy handed literary allusion, a bodily albatross Charlie must carry.

There are moments of extraordinary pathos in The Whale, but that’s less testament to the strength of the piece and more to Fraser’s deeply sympathetic delivery. Hunter and Aranofsky have given us a parable, and the problem with parables is that they reduce a complex reality to a digestible moral. Because Charlie’s condition is framed as self-inflicted, because of his established financial security, because of his pointed refusal to leave his confines, the film is fundamentally incurious about expanding on the lived experience of fatness and society’s deficiency in accommodating it compassionately, beyond funny looks from the pizza delivery guy. To The Whale’s mind joy must always be in spite of fatness rather than because of it, that much is clear, but even in this tired approach there is no exploration of the American healthcare system’s shortcomings in their treatment of fat patients, or the economic conditions and failures in mental health provisions that might cause someone to seek the easy fix of compulsive eating, because that would mean examining fatness beyond the realm of metaphor - and The Whale doesn’t have the stomach for that.