Whistle review
A couple of cool ideas can’t fully help Whistle overcome that it’s a throwback to a tough time in horror.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers.
Whistle
Directed by Corin Hardy
Written by Owen Egerton
Starring Dafne Keen, Sophie Nelisse, Percy Hynes White, Ali Skovbye, Sky Yang, Stephen Kalyn Michelle Fairley and Nick Frost
Whistle Review
Whistle has a couple of genuinely interesting ideas. I know what you’re thinking…if a review starts with that sentence…it’s not going to be a positive review. That might end up being true…though I don’t think Whistle is a bad movie. But it is the thought that I carried out of the theater after watching it. Interesting ideas have value even if the package they come in can be a bit…underwhelming. That’s how I’d describe Whistle. A movie that stands around burrowing concepts from other places…leaving a certain predictability about itself. But a movie that does a few cool things of its own that are worth checking out.
Whistle is a curse movie. So, you can probably guess which concepts it is burrowing. With a curse comes an investigation. Curse films also go hand in hand with rules for beating said curse. Whistle keeps its investigation simple…and it lifts its rules straight out of the Final Destination franchise. The bigger issue is what it unintentionally burrows…or perhaps evokes. This feels like a late 90s/early 00s teen character led horror movie. I knew the day would come when films would start doing this. A fifty year old director would have been in their early 20s during that post-Scream era of horror.
Whistle isn’t going for the meta-satirical commentary of Scream…but that movie influenced a lot more than a specific subgenre. A long decade of glossy, bad movies followed starring fresh faced young, unlikable characters. It’s difficult to pinpoint where exactly it went off the rails. It’s probably when everyone started trying to write smart characters in stupid situations. Scream made its characters extremely knowledgeable about the type of movie they found themselves trying to survive. Most of the movies that followed just gave us smart ass characters that were hard to root for. Whistle is far more like the latter group.
The story involves an ancient relic (a whistle, don’t you know) that curses anyone who hears it. This is where the movie’s cool ideas enter the chat. Hearing the whistle summons your own death. Literally. How you were fated to die shows up to kill you in that way. When a teacher (Nick Frost) blows the whistle…he is confronted by a cancer riddled version of his future self. What’s left behind is exactly what the teacher would have looked like at the time of their future death. It’s a great concept. Especially when parts of our cast have some brutal deaths awaiting them in the future. Whistle has a couple of very bloody scenes where those characters meet their fates long before they were supposed to.
Dafne Keen plays our lead character Chrys. She’s starting at a new school after a tragic turn of events. Her cousin Rel (Sky Yang) is there to show her the ropes. An unnecessarily clunky series of things lead to them falling in with the popular crowd. That includes a love interest for Chrys (Ellie, played by Sophie Nelisse) and Rel’s lifelong crush Grace (Ali Skovbye). Grace is dating a jock who was friends with a character we see succumb to the curse in the opening scene. There is also a common enemy in a youth pastor/drug dealer whose existence is clearly to allow for an out once the rules of the curse are discovered. It’s not the only character to carry the baggage of necessary plot points. Ellie has an unlikely amount of medical knowledge for a high school student…even one that wants to be a doctor one day. If you think they won’t be going to that well repeatedly…I don’t know what to tell you.
The characters just aren’t interesting enough to root for. Yeah…you can root for Chrys to overcome her trauma a little. You can root for the underdog Rel to a point. Grace is given a few moments that hint at hidden depths that ultimately don’t matter. Othe than that…we’re just here to watch the carnage. Which is fine. But predictable in ways that keep any attempt at suspense in check.
The question is really…what are you looking for? Some cool kills and a genuinely strong concept surrounding them? Whistle has that. And it’s worth looking into. But if you want a compelling narrative featuring interesting characters…you aren’t going to find them here. Horror movies can do just fine without those things. Whistle does just fine without them. But don’t expect anything more than just…fine.
Scare Value
The director of Whistle is best known for making the gigantic hit The Nun. Whistle is a lot better than The Nun. It’s a watchable and, at times, fun little story about a curse that picks people off one by one. With a killer concept and some bloody deaths to show…it covers some of the structural and character based problems that may remind you of the post Scream era. If you liked that era of films…you’re going to like Whistle more than I did. But there’s enough here to deliver a fine time at the movies. I just wish the concept could have been surrounded by a bit more in the good column.
2.5/5
Whistle Link
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