In A Baleia, we follow an English teacher and his fragile relationship with his daughter, Ellie. Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is a reclusive English professor living with severe obesity and battling a binge eating disorder. He teaches online, but he always leaves his webcam turned off, afraid of his appearance. Despite living alone, he is cared for by his friend and nurse, Liz (Hong Chau). Even so, he is alone, living daily only with guilt, for abandoning Ellie (Sadie Sink), his now teenage daughter who he left with her mother Mary (Samantha Morton), when she fell in love with a man. Now, he will seek to reconnect with his teenage daughter and repair his past mistakes. To do this, he asks Ellie to visit him without notifying her mother and she accepts, with the only condition that he help her rewrite an essay for school.