Whistle Review

Whistle is an Irish-Canadian horror film from the director of The Nun and the showrunner of the second season of Gangs of London.

Chrysanthemum “Chrys” Willet (Dafne Keen) has moved in with her extended family after the death of her father and time in rehab. On her first day of school, she finds a strange artefact that’s identified as an Aztec Death Whistle. After befriending a group of teens in detention, they invite Chrys to a pool party and blow the whistle for fun. This results in everyone who heard the sound being haunted by their death.

Whistle drew my interest because of its cast. Dafne Keen is known for her roles in Logan, His Dark Materials, and The Acolyte, and Sophie Nélisse is known for Yellowjackets, and I followed her career since The Book Thief. It’s a higher calibre cast that’s normally seen in these types of films. In the UK and Ireland, Whistle was distributed by Black Bear Pictures, which gave Whistle an air of quality. It was a shame that the subsequent film was a derivative offering.

Whistle lifted a lot of ideas from other horror movies. The film felt similar to Tarot, which also showed a group of teens thinking it’s a good idea to play around with some sort of ancient supernatural item, becoming haunted by creatures wanting to kill them because of this. Whistle shared a similar plot structure where the teens play around, then are haunted, investigate the phenomenon, and try to find a way to stop the malicious spirits. Game of Thrones’ Michelle Fairley played the same role as Olwen Fouéré in Tarot, where they were the older character who revealed the truth about the device and acted as a mentor.

Other films that served as ‘inspiration’ were It Follows and the Final Destination series. The teens could see the presence haunting them and attempted to run away from it, as Maika Monroe did in It Follows. Whilst like the Final Destination series, Whistle showed that messing around with Death meant Death would get even. To try to cheat death, the targets needed to consider doing extreme actions. As Whistle progressed, it lifted ideas from Smile 2, but going into feature detail will lead to spoilers.

The way the group of teens met was like The Breakfast Club. They met in detention, and their dynamic was similar. Chrys was the misfit. Her cousin, Rel (Sky Yang), was a nerd. He fancied Grace (Ali Skovbye), the popular girl. Grace was dating Dean (Jhaleil Swaby), who was an arrogant jerk. Finally, there was Ellie (Nélisse), who was academically minded, and Chrys quickly got close to her. They were all basic archetypes with some simple quirks, like Rel being a sharpshooter and Grace being interested in archaeology. Dean was so obnoxious that I wanted him to die.

The cast was fine for the most part. Keen was the highlight as the outsider with loads of personal baggage. There was even a little humour when Chrys debated what she would text to Ellie. However, most of the cast looked older than actual high school students. Nélisse was a grown woman who looked older than the actor playing the main human antagonist, and it came off as ridiculous that a high school student was able to act like a doctor.

Many mainstream films do follow a screenwriting template and have character archetypes. And many films have been influenced by other projects. Look at the Oscar-nominated Sinners, which was inspired by From Dusk Till Dawn. However, Whistle was frustrating because it took no chances or put any spin on the material. It was storytelling by numbers.

As a horror film, Whistle was a self-serious affair. It was notable when compared to the Final Destination films, which had fun with all the death on display, and audiences could relish the filmmakers’ sadistic vision. Whistle wanted its death to be weighty, and there were moments of tension as characters tried to escape the inevitable, but it was undercut by the heavy use of CGI, which made the deaths look sillier than intended. Having a more serious tone, it led to a question: if so many people from the same high school died in quick succession, wouldn’t that draw the attention of the authorities?

On a final note, Hardy was attached to direct The Crow remake/reboot. He clearly referenced this because Rel dressed up as a comic book called The Revenger, and he looked a lot like Brandon Lee’s version of The Crow.

Whistle was a disappointing, uninspired horror offering that offered nothing new as a horror story or spectacle. It was a cookie-cutter horror experience.