Courtney Howard // Film Critic
WHISTLE
Rated R, 1 hour and 42 minutes
Directed by: Corin Hardy
Starring: Dafne Keen, Sophie Nélisse, Ali Skovbye, Sky Yang, Jhaleil Swaby, Percy Hynes White, Nick Frost, Stephen Kalyn, Michelle Fairley
WHISTLE, a horror film about a group of teens who discover a creepy antique whistle and unwittingly summon their premature deaths, is one of the worst, most inept horror films I’ve seen in quite some time. The terrible tale begins on a rapid series of cheap jump scares and, from there, it doesn’t generate much in the way of tension, thrills or good kills. What director Corin Hardy and writer Owen Egerton do deliver is a desperate, try-hard mash-up of FINAL DESTINATION and TALK TO ME, demonstrating in the process that they’ve failed to grasp why those movies work as efficiently and effectively as they do and why their Frankenstein’d creation does not. In terms of cursed objet d’art movies, this one hues closer to WISH UPON due to its lack of creative ingenuity and piss-poor execution.
Grief-and-guilt-stricken high schooler Chrysanthemum “Chrys” Willet (Dafne Keen) has just moved to a non-descript working class town (shot in Toronto) after the death of her beloved father. While she’d love to stay home and find solace in her dad’s vintage vinyl collection, her gregarious, comic book-obsessed cousin Rel (Sky Yang) is determined to lift her spirits during this, the start of her senior year. Members of the school’s cool clique are quick to rudely make her acquaintance, including arrogant jock Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and rich mean girl Grace (Ali Skovbye). Kind-hearted Ellie (Sophie Nélisse), on whom Chrys develops an immediate crush, interferes with Dean and Grace’s bullying, landing everyone in detention with teacher Mr. Craven (Nick Frost).
Chrys has been assigned a locker belonging to Pellington High’s star basketball player Mason (Stephen Kalyn), who recently died under suspicious circumstances on campus after a winning game. Astoundingly (in the first of many logic-defying elements), no one cleaned out his locker during any investigation into his death. How convenient! She finds a spooky artifact on the top shelf: an ancient, skull-shaped Aztec death whistle. However, these Breakfast Club wannabes misread the inscription carved on it as “summon the dead” and carelessly blow the insidious instrument in hopes of communing with the dead. Instead, discover they’ve just beckoned for their own untimely demises. As Chrys and Ellie try to figure a way out of their predicament, the bodies of their peers begin to stack up.
By the look, tone and feel of the film, it’s a good assumption Hardy and company wanted to create a nostalgic ode to 90s pop culture. Nods to names like Pellington (as in director Mark Pellington) and Craven (as in director Wes Craven), cuts on the soundtrack (as in those from Concrete Blonde), as well as the opening title sequence featuring a camera gliding along a body of water and, later, a kooky expository female figure (like in I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER) read as clear homage. Björn Charpentier’s cinematography, specifically during the Harvest Fest sequence, evokes the color palette and stylish glean of IKWYDLS. There’s a noticeable sense of aspiration to emulate Neal H. Moritz-produced films of that fertile era, as the film shares a similar aesthetic and ensemble ethos with IKWYDLS (and its sequel) and URBAN LEGEND (and its sequel). But their pooled inspirations come across as hollowed out references, as does the narrative mimeographing of the aforementioned features FINAL DESTINATION and TALK TO ME.
Gorehounds will be disappointed since the kills are uninventive and not the least bit scary, nor entertaining on any level of blood-lust. The escalating shenanigans are obnoxious and abrasive, frequently punctuated by Doomphonic’s loud, shrill industrial score. Sound design and lighting rigs do much of the work during Grace’s inevitable death scene. Visual effects do a lot of heavy lifting, especially late in the proceedings utilizing CG blood and broken body parts, leading to a fairly weightless impact on the audience. The filmmakers can’t even stick to their own rules of the world. Unlike the others featured, Dean and Rel’s gnarly departures aren’t due to ghostly visitations, nor outlandishly staged Rube Goldberg machines like FINAL DESTINATION, which would’ve been fun and clever. They just happen out of thin air – not dictated by death’s mandated specific locations. The frights fizzle fast.
Characters aren’t properly developed. We don’t care about any of them since we’re not given substantial reasons to care about them. Chrys is defined by her daddy issues. While we’d like to see her grow and heal from any guilt she feels about the circumstances behind her dad’s death, the only way she does is by embarking on a romantic relationship with Ellie, who’s primarily defined by her diabetes diagnosis. Dean and Grace were jerks to begin with and their comeuppances don’t feel the least bit satisfying. Rel evolves into an awkward sad-sack the more he idolizes his poor man’s THE CROW-adjacent comic book hero, “The Revenger.” Plus, there are nonsensical hijinks surrounding the town’s drug-dealing youth pastor (Percy Hynes White) which don’t make a lick of sense until we realize he’s exclusively in the script to help engineer the incredibly dumb dénouement.
With a mid-credits coda that unapologetically lifts SMILE 2’s finale, WHISTLE is a junky entry into a year marked by stronger, smarter horror films made for savvier audiences.
Grade: F
WHISTLE opens in theaters on February 6.
