In a flashback to 2015, Mitt Gardiner recites a quote from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945) to his 10-year-old son, Jay. While waiting in a hotel parking lot, about to be fired from yet another job, Mitt expresses his reverence for Steinbeck’s vision of Monterey and condemns the modern tourism that he believes has destroyed the essence of the area and endangered the natural environment.

Mitt gives Jay his treasured, water-damaged copy of the book. As Jay holds it, a chunk of pages falls out and is scattered by the wind. Mitt plucks another page and lets it fly away, comparing the lost pages to people losing parts of themselves until death finally claims them. He also points out that water damage makes the book bloat, just a drowned corpse would. Mitt’s hand, missing half a finger, is visible as he handles the book.

In the present, Jay parks in a preschool lot. He sees official vehicles from NOAA, NMFS, and the US Coast Guard. The sight of the Coast Guard makes him anxious, triggering a memory of his father’s intense hatred for the agency, the members of which Mitt always referred to as the “Dirty CGs.”

Jay briefly flashes back to a memory of Mitt berating a Coast Guard officer. Now, despite his apprehension about the treacherous dive, Jay resolves not to be deterred and plans to enter the water stealthily in order to avoid being seen.

In the preschool parking lot, Jay puts on his old, worn wetsuit. The suit triggers a memory of a past dive with Mitt, who was stolidly unsympathetic when Jay’s zipper broke. On that day, Mitt forced his son to dive in the freezing water despite his defective suit.

Jay recently had the zipper repaired by a local cobbler named Mel. He went out of his way to find the cobbler in order to avoid the members of the local dive community, who revered Mitt but now despise Jay because they believe that he abandoned his dying father.

Jay successfully zips up the wetsuit and mentally blesses Mel as he seals himself inside.

A flashback to 2017 shows Mitt suiting up for what he calls his lowliest job yet: retrieving lost golf balls from a murky pond. In front of his family, Mitt boasts of his glamorous diving past, causing his 12-year-old son deep embarrassment.

Jay’s sisters, Nan and Eva, roll their eyes at their father’s stories while their mother stands by silently. The young Jay notes his father’s unhappiness with his career decline and increasingly strained family life.

In the present, Jay prepares the rest of his gear, including a third-hand Buoyancy Control Device (BCD) and a heavy steel air tank. Lacking proper dive weights, he fills his BCD pockets with D batteries, hoping that the fabric will hold.

After attaching the regulator assembly to the tank, he prepares to lift the 70-pound rig onto his back, feeling its physical and emotional weight.

In a 2017 flashback, Mitt belittles 12-year-old Jay’s modern diving certifications. Mitt’s only friend, Hewey, a former dentist who cannot swim, gently tells Mitt not to be mean to his son.

Mitt, whose body is covered in nautical tattoos and scars, ignores Hewey. He describes his own brutal, uncertified dive training, contrasting it with Jay’s formalized education.

In the present, Jay struggles to hoist the heavy BCD and tank onto his shoulders. Once standing, he feels the crushing weight as a physical and emotional burden that he has inherited from his father.

He retrieves his dive mask and smears baby shampoo inside the lens as a cheap defogging agent: a trick that Mitt taught him. His knees briefly shake, and he acknowledges that it is trauma, not the weight of his equipment, that has caused this moment of vulnerability.

The scent of the baby shampoo sends Jay back to a memory from 2016. In a kayak with his father, 11-year-old Jay asks if the baby shampoo is the same kind that his mother used on him as an infant. Mitt responds with a cruel comment, criticizing Jay for crying too much as a baby. Jay’s good mood falters, and he morosely reflects on his father’s constant disapproval of his sensitive nature.

Jay takes his fins and a mesh bag from the trunk, clipping the bag to his BCD with a boat snap that he borrowed from his friend, Chloe Tarshish. He knows that divers call this type of fastener a “suicide clip” because it is prone to snagging.

He notes the irony of using a suicide clip at the very site of his father’s death by suicide. As he slams the trunk, Jay reflects that he should have anticipated Mitt’s death by suicide after his father was diagnosed with cancer.

The narrative shifts to a flashback to 2021. At this point in time, Jay has already left home and has been living with the Tarshish family for five months. His mother calls to inform him that Mitt has terminal mesothelioma, an aggressive cancer likely caused by asbestos exposure.

His mother tells him Mitt has only a year or two left to live. She pleads with Jay to come home.

Carrying his heavy equipment, Jay walks along the Carmel Meadows Trail toward the beach. As he passes numerous signs that warn of the beach’s dangerous conditions, he reflects that his father deliberately chose this treacherous place to die.

Once he is on the trail, the dive gear begins to feel familiar on his body, and he feels a stab of regret when he reflects that his father could have created so many positive diving experiences for him if Mitt had not “bullied” him into the water. Jay soon reaches a vantage point where he can see the beach, which he now thinks of as Mitt’s graveyard.

From his overlook, Jay observes the foggy conditions and the rough surf. He recalls Mitt making him promise never to dive solo at Monastery Beach, which local divers call “Mortuary Beach.” He also remembers a recent incident in which a local diver spat on him, reinforcing Jay’s outcast status in the wake of Mitt’s death.

Jay feels that he cannot continue living with the contempt of the local divers. He looks toward the deep-water canyon that he knows is offshore, then murmurs a line from Dante’s Inferno about abandoning all hope upon entering the gates of hell.

Jay makes his way down decaying wooden stairs to the beach. He sees a large work crew with a bulldozer at the south end of the beach and ducks behind an uprooted tree to avoid being seen. He decides to enter the water from a treacherous, rocky area so that he can remain concealed from view. Gripping his mesh bag, he confirms its purpose: to carry his father’s remains.

In a flashback to a Wednesday morning in 2021, Hewey finds Jay on the Tarshish family’s lawn, and Jay knows instantly that his father is dead. Hewey confirms that Mitt died by suicide, having thrown himself off Hewey’s rowboat at Monastery Beach.

Jay intuits that Mitt purposefully used Hewey’s inability to swim in order to ensure that no rescue attempt could be made. Hewey drives Jay to his mother.

On the beach, Jay contemplates his knowledge of how a human body decomposes in the ocean. He hopes to find his father’s skull or a few other bones to collect in his mesh bag. He believes that giving Mitt a proper burial will restore his own reputation in the diving community and in his family’s eyes.

The thought triggers a memory of a dream in which he found his father’s bones and kissed them. They tasted like tears.

At the water’s edge, Jay inflates his BCD to ensure that it is functioning. He opens his tank valve and checks his instrument console; the pressure gauge reads a full 3,000 psi.

He puts the regulator in his mouth, but his anxious breathing wastes air. He hears his father’s critical admonition in his head, scolding him for the mistake.

In a flashback to the past year, Jay reflects on his time living with Chloe Tarshish’s family and with others in the aftermath of his decision to leave home. He recalls his sisters begging him to return after the funeral, and his refusal. At the time, he had “big plans” to study forestry at Berkely and get a job at a national park, but he knows that the ghosts of his past are now his “undertow.”

Remembering his childhood home, he thinks about his father’s constant dissatisfaction and concludes that he was raised to be a first mate on a ship headed for disaster.

Fearing discovery, Jay forgoes the usual pre-dive checklist and runs straight into the turbulent surf, aiming to get beyond the danger zone before the waves can take him down. A powerful wave strikes him, but he recovers. In the water, the weight of his gear vanishes, and he dons his fins as he floats on his back.

Suddenly, he is caught in a powerful rip current. He realizes that his diving muscles have atrophied in his two years away from the water, and he struggles against the current.

In a flashback to 2013, Mitt quizzes a young Jay on a series of diving and marine biology facts, such as the difference between a riptide and a rip current. Jay grows frustrated and tells his father that memorizing all of these facts is stupid.

Mitt sternly insists that the information is important and tells Jay that one day, one of those “stupid facts” will save his life.

In the present, Jay recalls his father’s lessons and stops fighting the rip current. Instead, he swims parallel to the beach and quickly escapes its pull, but he immediately becomes entangled in a thick layer of kelp.

He performs a surface dive to pull the kelp off his legs. Upon returning to the surface, he realizes with chagrin that he forgot his diving gloves, but he knows that it is too late to go back for them.

A flashback offers a further glimpse of Mitt’s golf-ball retrieval job. Mitt explains to Jay that he performs this work without gloves, relying on touch to find the balls in the filthy, zero-visibility pond.

Jay remembers a time when Mitt worked as a dive guide on a charter boat. That job ended when Mitt was fired for riling up his customers by claiming that the 9/11 attacks were a godsend for whales because of the subsequent reduction in ship traffic. As Mitt immerses himself in the filthy water, a younger Jay watches and cringes in shame at the derisive laughter of the nearby golfers who ridicule his father.

Floating offshore, Jay sees the decaying corpse of a sea lion and kicks away from it. He lets cold seawater into his wetsuit to regulate his body temperature.

He navigates toward the “washrock,” a point of orientation indicating the spot where he must begin his descent. He mentally recites more diving trivia that Mitt drilled into him and contemplates his own lost faith in God.

A flashback to 2019 shows a 14-year-old Jay in a kayak, declining the invitation of a second dive with Mitt. Hewey paddles Jay to shore, and they attend mass at the nearby Carmelite Monastery.

Inside, Hewey translates a Latin phrase for Jay as “Our conversation is in heaven” (45). He then jokes that while there is conversation in the church, heaven is outside in the ocean.

Now positioned over the washrock, Jay prepares to descend. He performs a simple belly flop, plunging forward into the water to begin his dive.

He compares the sensation to a regression into a more primitive, aquatic form, or an evolution beyond the need for legs.

Jay belatedly remembers to deflate his BCD so that he can descend through a dense kelp forest populated by rockfish and a large egg-yolk jellyfish. He reaches the sandy bottom and begins to swim horizontally, feeling as if he is flying over the seafloor.

He feels a slight leak in his mask and wonders if it is seawater or his own tears. He reflects that a part of him died in this ocean long before his father ever did.

In a flashback to the day of Mitt’s funeral, Jay sits with Hewey, who asks Jay if he ever attended a “water show” featuring dolphins and porpoises. This question prompts Jay to recall an awkward day when his mother offered to take the children to Ocean World. Mitt asked a young Jay to go diving with him instead, and when Jay shamefacedly whispered his preference to go to Ocean World, his father treated him to an expression of silent disgust. Jay writhed in anguished, silent shame for the entire trip to Ocean World.

As Jay sits with Hewey at Mitt’s funeral, he asks what his father used to weigh himself down on the day he died. Hewey confirms that Mitt used dive weights and then attempts to justify Mitt’s actions, equating Mitt’s choice to die with Jesus’s choice to accept death on the cross. He also tells Jay that in Hebrew, the words for “sailors” and “angels” are homophones.

Now at a depth of 40 feet, Jay checks his instrument console. He resents not having a modern dive computer and reflects that his father scorned this technology as a crutch for inferior divers.

He glides over the vibrant sea floor and thinks that Mitt chose a beautiful place to die. Forcing himself to refocus, he spots what appears to be a human head with long hair.

A flashback reveals details from the night that Jay left home. At 2:00 am on August 1, 2020, a furious 15-year-old Jay returns home late and packs a duffel bag. His mother and sisters confront him, but he is determined to leave. When he pushes past them, he accidentally elbows his mother.

Ignoring his sisters’ entreaties, he leaves the house on foot. His last memory of his father is the sight of Mitt’s bloody face as the man stood on the deck of his boat, the Sleep.

Underwater, Jay realizes that the “human head” is just a rock with kelp. He reflects that many sea creatures resemble different human organs. He consults his compass and confirms that he has reached the correct search coordinates that Hewey provided. This is the site of his father’s death.

He vents air from his BCD in order to sink to the bottom. He begins pulling himself along the seafloor, scanning the sand for his father’s remains.

Jay crawls along the bottom and reflects that his current quest has nothing to do with exploring the ocean for its own sake, as Mitt would have done. Now, he wants to restore his reputation in the diving community and reaffirm to himself that he was right to leave home on that fateful day. Determined to prove that he is “better” and stronger than his father ever was, he pushes down his fear and uses his bare hands to dig into the sand inside a rocky crevice, but he finds no sign of Mitt’s remains.

However, his digging stirs up a large cloud of silt and destroys his visibility. Unable to see ahead clearly, he checks his instrument console, which shows that he is at 72 feet, with 2,768 psi of air remaining.

As the silt clears, Jay sees one starfish, then another. He realizes that they form a trail leading west. Believing that this is some sort of spiritual sign, he decides to follow them.

He knows that the trail will lead toward the edge of the dangerously deep Carmel Canyon, but he proceeds anyway, believing that the story of following “stars” to find his father will be powerful enough to earn his family’s forgiveness.

In a flashback to June 2021, Jay agrees to meet his mother, Nan, and Eva at a burger restaurant. He has not seen them in months and notices his sisters seem more confident. After an emotional reunion, his mother tells him his dying father is constantly asking for him. She reveals that Mitt repeatedly says, “Don’t break my heart” (64).

Jay follows the starfish trail deeper, observing how the reef’s vibrant colors fade as he descends, and he recalls Mitt’s lessons on the subject—especially the fact that divers can figure out his general depth by the quality of the light and the colors that surround them. The journey makes Jay reflect on his father’s role as a staunch environmentalist who fought against illegal fishing, taking bold, destructive actions that sometimes landed him in jail.

Jay concludes that Mitt was protective of the ocean and, in his own way, of his family as well. However, Jay also realizes that although Mitt protected Nan and Eva, he never showed that protective side to his son.

The flashback to the family meeting at the restaurant continues. Jay argues with his family, accusing them of staging a coordinated attack to manipulate him into returning home. He defends his long absence by pointing to his academic success in recent months.

His mother and sisters dismiss his academic accomplishments out of hand, insisting that he is merely showing off. They then express concern that he seems depressed. His mother begins to cry and begs him not to break his dying father’s heart.

Jay arrives at the edge of Carmel Canyon, a sheer cliff that drops into blackness. He holds onto a rock to steady himself, his ungloved hands aching from the intense cold.

He checks his console and notes that he is now at a depth of 95 feet. He knows that he can only descend another 10 or 15 feet before risking nitrogen narcosis, a condition that impairs divers’ judgment. Despite the risk, he resolves to continue.

A flashback to 2014 shows Mitt explaining nitrogen narcosis to a nine-year-old Jay. Mitt describes the dangerous, drunken-like state and the hallucinations it can cause, including a form of paranoia so intense that it can make a diver believe that they should kill their buddy before their buddy kills them.

After hearing this, young Jay has a sudden, intrusive thought about killing his father before his father can kill him.

Jay pulls himself lower down the canyon wall. Reaching into a crevice, he pulls out a red abalone shell. He then notices the water is filled with a swirling light and that a new light source has appeared behind him.

The starfish on the rocks appear to transform into actual stars. Feeling disoriented, he suspects that he is beginning to experience nitrogen narcosis.

Jay watches as hundreds of white lights orbit him. He soon realizes that the lights are not a hallucination but the bioluminescence of a giant squid (Architeuthis dux).

He remembers his father telling a story about once finding a dead giant squid washed ashore and touching its skin with reverence.

The giant squid rotates, bringing its enormous, soccer-ball-sized eye into view. Jay feels an initial shiver of fear, which quickly gives way to a sense of “diver’s peace.” He recognizes that this encounter is an extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime event and feels a sudden sense of triumph, knowing that this moment surpasses anything his father ever saw.

Jay assumes that the deep-sea squid is near the surface because it is either sick or has been disturbed. His mask begins to fog, and he decides to perform the usual mask-clearing maneuver, which requires him to let go of the cliff wall. Thinking of his sisters’ grief over Mitt, he imagines that the saltwater surrounding him is made of their tears.

As he floats freely, he successfully clears his mask, and hen his vision is restored, he sees that the squid is now glowing a brilliant gold. At the same moment, a powerful, unseen current pushes him sideways.

A flashback to August 1, 2020, shows Mitt in the water, furiously berating a 15-year-old Jay for nearly surfacing directly into a boat’s moving propeller.

Mitt insists that Jay should have been able to feel the push of the boat’s pressure wave. To demonstrate, he aggressively splashes water in Jay’s face while Hewey watches from the boat.

The narrative returns to the present. Suspended in the water, Jay feels a massive push against his body and hears a distinct, repetitive “TAK” sound cutting through the water.

Feeling a swelling current pressing against him, he instantly recognizes the sensation as a massive version of a pressure wave and recalls his father’s warning about this phenomenon, which signals that a very large object is moving nearby.

A massive, pale blue, mottled creature rises from the depths below Jay. He sees its 20-foot-wide mouth and its distant tail flukes.

Analyzing the creature’s size, shape, and color, he recalls his father’s exacting lessons and identifies the creature as a sperm whale.