Review: WHISTLE

 by Patrick Bromley

Don't blow it.

I was so hoping Whistle, the new horror film from IFC and Shudder, would be the latest lunatic teen horror in the tradition of Wish Upon and The Bye Bye Man -- you know, the kinds of movies Adam Riske loves to champion. The bones are all there: earnest cast of young actors, cursed object, complicated mythology, clumsy exposition, sequence at a Harvest Festival. What's missing is the spaces between the notes, the manic energy that makes trashy January horror fun. Too often, Whistle insists it be taken seriously. I'm willing to go along with that until I remember this is a movie about a haunted whistle that kills you if you hear it.

Dafne Keen (Logan's X23) plays Chrys (short for Chrysanthemum, because movies), a former addict who moves in with her cousin and starts attending a new school. Inside her new locker is an Aztec death whistle, which I understand is a thing, left there by the locker's previous owner who died mysteriously in the school showers. When a member of her new friend group blows the death whistle, a curse is placed upon all of them that basically sentences them all to a horrible fate. It's basically Final Destination with an added wrinkle in which the thing that kills them is how they would have died eventually only it happens instantaneously. Or something. Point is, a lot of them die in horrible ways.

There's a lot to like about Whistle. English director Corin Hardy (The Hallow and The Nun) has a strong visual sense, giving this fairly standard material a sheen of class and craftsmanship it might not have otherwise had in lesser hands. Dafne Keen doesn't act so much as glower, but her burgeoning relationship with Sophie Nélisse (Yellowjackets) is sweet and refreshing for this sort of genre film in its matter-of-factness. The film is at its best when it really cuts loose and gives itself over to its own outrageousness, particularly in two insane and inspired gore sequences in the second half. Had Whistle managed to maintain that level of energy and shock value throughout -- or at the very least more consistently -- I'd be giving it a full-throated recommendation.

Unfortunately, most of the movie falls into routine horror trappings of the last 20 years. The whole "Death comes for us all" thesis was explored better and more thoughtfully in any number of movies like It Follows to Wish Upon to just the last year alone in both The Monkey and even Final Destination: Bloodlines, a movie I do not love. The characters, if I can call them that, are beyond thin -- they're only distinguishable from one another because they look different. The whole thing exists mostly as a clothesline on which to hang death sequences -- itself not a criticism, because that's been the foundation of teen horror movies going back 40 years -- but the sequences themselves don't quite justify the rest of the dressing (save for the two aforementioned, which alone make the movie worth checking out). It's uninspired writing, sad to say. The movie even does the thing where it drops in the names of famous genre directors like Craven and Verhoeven and Muschietti, a device I thought grew tired shortly after Night of the Creeps did it in 1986. 

I'm being too hard on Whistle because it's one of those horror movies that's just good enough that I want it to be better. Were it somewhat more self-aware and less interested in elevating weak material -- if it were, not to put too fine a point on it, more willing to be dumb -- it might have stood out more amidst a crowded genre landscape and at least been the kind of thing fans remember for its silliness. As haunted whistle movies go, it's not bad. As Final Destination copies go, it could be better.

Whistle is in theaters today.