There are many subgenres of horror, but one of the most reliable is the “kids eff around and find out”. It’s a reliable setup that doesn’t require much work from filmmakers or the audience to make for a good time at the movies, even if the film we’re talking about isn’t that good to begin with. Whistle is the latest release in this subgroup.
Opening with Chrys (Dafne Keen), a damaged young woman who arrives in a new small town to live with her cousin Rel (Sky Yang), after a family tragedy. One can tell she has trauma because she has a deliberately messy pixie cut, listens to vinyl, and describes the act of getting a tattoo as “choosing something you love and letting it scar you for life”. Sky quickly introduces her to the other kids in their school. These kids line up with the standard archetypes of this kind of horror movie, where if Sky is the fool, then Ellie (Sophie Nélisse) is the nerdy one, Dean (Jhaliel Swaby) is the dumb athlete, and Grace (Ali Skovbye) is the stereotypical hot one. There is also Noah (Percy Hynes White), a local youth pastor, drug dealer, and sleaze bag.
In Chrys’s first moments at school, she opens her new locker -previously belonging to a basketball player who died in a freak fire- to find an intricately carved urn that contains an Aztec death whistle. This whistle looks entirely sinister, but of course, it compels anyone who finds it to blow it, and once they eff around and do that, they begin to find out that their future deaths have been brought forward to the present.
Yes, you read that right. The whistle summons their future death. If you’re destined to die of cancer in 20 years, then a mysterious force will stalk you and give you that cancer right now. Each character who hears the while is stalked by death, one at a time, not unlike the Final Destination franchise, but with fewer discernible rules and an actual entity rather than rube goldberg machines.
For example, all five main characters hear the whistle at the same time, but the time it takes death to catch up with them varies greatly. Despite an appearance by Michelle Fairley to ominously explain what’s going on, it’s never clear why the Whistle ended up in Chrys’s locker, or whether the whistle itself has some conscious intent to come after people, either. At the end of the day, though, these are not the right kind of questions for this kind of movie.
Where Whistle shines is where one wants a film like this to shine: most of the kills are brutal, gnarly, and creative. Each character is destined to die in a unique way, and there is a great mix of practical and digital effects to make each of them happen. Two, in particular, are incredibly bloody and fun. There’s also a nice touch in the way Chrys is taunted by death, which ties together in a very satisfying way during the film’s climax.
A film like this is carried by the performances, and everyone in Whistle is as up to the task as they need to be. There’s a memorable appearance from Nick Frost as a tired, put-upon high school teacher, and Michelle Fairley delivers some truly ridiculous exposition as only a trained British thespian can. Keen and Nélisse work well as the mismatched leads of the ensemble, and both commit to the bit in exactly the right way. All of this is to say that the film isn’t exactly good, but it is occasionally very fun, and while it’s not going to be for everyone there is a lot for horror fans at least to appreciate.
Whistle is now in theaters.
Learn more about the film at the official website for the title.
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