anywhere out of the world: The Whaler Boy: A 30-Year-Old Russian Shoots His First Feature (No Whales Harmed, Libido Possibly Was)

The Whale’s Journey (or: 88 Kilometers, One Click, and a Lot of Libido)

There is a moment in The Whale’s Journey when a teenage boy stares at a map and realizes something that has haunted humanity since the invention of cartography: reality is deeply unfair to scale.

Alaska is right there. A couple of centimeters. A short swim. A brisk walk, if you squint hard enough. And yet—tragically, bureaucratically, existentially—it might as well be Mars.

Welcome to Chukotka, Russia’s northeastern edge, a place so remote it makes Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog look like a cheerful tourist postcard.

Replace the romantic mist with tundra, the sublime solitude with Wi-Fi, and the wandering philosopher with a horny teenager, and you’re getting close.

Our hero lives in a land of whales, whalers, and women who exist mostly as buffering pixels on a laptop screen.

Real women are rarer here than a Tarkovsky joke, so the internet steps in, heroically and shamelessly, offering an endless loop of half-naked smiles that feel less like human connection and more like Andy Warhol’s assembly line of desire: same gaze, same promise, different time zone.

The distance between Russia and the USA collapses online faster than a cubist perspective.

Zoom calls erase borders like Mondrian erased diagonals.

Emotionally, Alaska feels closer than the next village.

Physically? Not so much. The Bering Strait remains stubbornly unimpressed by broadband speeds.

Director Philipp Yuryev, in his debut feature, films this frozen libido-pressure cooker with a straight face that somehow makes everything funnier.

The film watches these young men the way a Flemish painter might observe peasants: up close, unflattering, and deeply human.

Faces are filmed in tight close-ups, pores and acne glowing like Renaissance chiaroscuro, libido practically leaking out of the frame.

Entertainment options in Chukotka include:

Whaling
Drinking
Possibly one bar (blink and you’ll miss it)
The internet, aka the Louvre of late-night loneliness

After encounters with sex workers—scenes that land somewhere between Buñuel’s deadpan cruelty and the emotional hangover of a bad Tinder date—nothing is resolved. Desire either goes numb or mutates into obsession.

Love becomes less Romeo and Juliet and more Rear Window, except James Stewart had better heating and fewer whales.

Everyone dreams of escape.

Some accept routine like extras in a Russian realist painting.

Others stare across the water toward the promised land, imagining the USA as a glowing Hopper diner: neon, freedom, romance, and definitely no border patrol. Just 88 kilometers away—barely a brushstroke.

Whales cross it all the time. Majestic, borderless, smug.

So why not humans?

Because this isn’t a fairy tale—it’s a quietly cruel joke.

Those who manage to make the crossing (dodging guards, poachers, and reality itself) don’t find paradise.

They find memory. And memory, like Instagram filters or impressionist painting, makes everything softer, prettier, and slightly fake.

Reality flips into virtuality, and the dream retreats into the past, polished and replayed one last time.

By the time The Whale’s Journey reaches its dreamy finale, it feels less like a coming-of-age story and more like a melancholic art installation titled “Click Here to Escape”.

A film where geography is the villain, Wi-Fi is the accomplice, and love is always buffering.

Now on French screens, I watched this film at the 61st Thessaloniki International Film Festival—online, of course.

Which felt oddly appropriate.

After all, distance has never looked so small.

Or felt so impossible.