Killer Whale is a 2026 aquatic horror directed by Jo-Anne Brechin and co-written with Katharine McPhee, an Australian production shot across Thailand and Queensland. It stars Virginia Gardner as Maddie, Mel Jarnson as Trish, and Mitchell Hope as Josh, with a fully CGI orca named Ceto doing the titular killing. It currently sits at around twenty percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and having now watched it, I'd like a word with everyone responsible. This is one of the worst things I've sat through in a long time, so in the spirit of the film, let me just walk you through what actually happens.It opens with the killer whale killing someone. The catch is you don't really see it, because the budget clearly couldn't stretch to showing the one thing the movie is named after. That's the first warning sign, and it arrives in the first few minutes.We're then introduced to Maddie, a cellist working a shift at a diner that promptly gets robbed. In the chaos she's left with permanent hearing damage, and her boyfriend Chad chases the robber outside only to be immediately run over by a car. I have to be honest, his death is so abrupt and so unintentionally ridiculous that I laughed out loud, and I've since learned I'm not the only reviewer who did. Chad goes from boyfriend to deceased in the space of a single cut.Jump forward a year. The whale is still causing problems, and it kills a park worker who, for reasons known only to him, decides to reach into a giant orca tank while wearing flippers. In the fallout, Ceto is released. Maddie, her best friend Trish, and a chiselled local named Josh then take a jet ski out to a remote lagoon, which turns out to be a perfectly circular atoll the whale has somehow ended up trapped in. The film never explains how the orca got there or why the lagoon is a neat circle. It simply needs them trapped, so they're trapped. Josh is eaten almost immediately.Stranded on a rock, the film then attempts its big emotional gut-punch: Trish confesses that she orchestrated the diner robbery in the first place, to pay off a debt, on the apparent logic that a small-town diner till is a viable target for life-changing money. So Trish is, indirectly, the reason Chad is dead and Maddie can't hear. It's a wildly contrived reveal, dropped at the least convenient possible moment. Trish then tries to redeem herself by swimming to shore to scratch an SOS into the sand for a passing plane, and gets her leg bitten off for the trouble, bleeding out on the beach. Maddie, left alone, somehow holds her breath for an implausibly long stretch, stabs Ceto in the eye, kills it, gets rescued, and returns to her music.Now for the technical side, because it's remarkable. The green screen work is so poor that several reviewers, myself included, came away unconvinced the cast were ever near actual water, let alone the ocean. Possibly not even a swimming pool. The whole thing plays like a soggy retread of Fall, the 2022 tower-survival film that also starred Virginia Gardner, except swapped from a great height to a wet rock, and worse in every respect. And the detail that tips the entire premise into farce: orcas have never killed a human being in the wild. Not once. The film even nods to this fact, then proceeds to build an entire revenge thriller around the one apex sea creature with a genuinely spotless record against humans.There's a real idea buried in here about animal captivity and cruelty, and Gardner and Jarnson are honestly better than the material deserves. But none of it survives the cheapness, the contrivances, and the sheer silliness on display.1 out of 10. A genuine waste of time, and everyone involved should feel a little bit bad.