Michael Fairbanks
When dealing with movies like Corin Hardy’s teeny bopper horror flick Whistle, it is important to remember that some people have never seen a scary movie before. When you’ve spent over a decade of your life seeking out disturbing and transgressive material, a story about a Mayan death flute taking out a bunch of high schoolers barely even registers. However, there are kids who are newly ready to take a step up from Goosebumps. Perhaps they’re starting to date and need an excuse to hold hands in a dark room or want an opportunity to scream loudly in a public space. For that crowd, Whistle just might sing. Everybody else need not apply, even though there’s nothing offensive about this.
The film opens with a spooky version of High School Musical: Senior Year’s “Now or Never” sequence. Pellington High’s star basketball player Mason “Horse” Raymore (Stephen Kalyn) puts up a game winning shot, but alas it is not Vanessa Hudgens waiting for him in the stands. Instead, he sees an ashy figure taunting him from under the hoop. That creepy man follows him to the showers and burns him alive. Some time later, we follow angsty recovering addict Chrys (Logan’s Dafne Keen) as she moves to a new town to live with her dorky cousin Rel (Sky Yang) and attend Pellington.
When Chrys is assigned Mason’s old locker and inside, she finds the titular whistle carved in the ominous shape of a skull. After a spat with local jock Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and his girlfriend Grace (Alissa Skovbye), Chrys finds herself in detention with grumpy history teacher Mr. Craven (Nick Frost), who is immediately captivated by the whistle. Aspiring doctor Ellie (Sophie Nélisse) is also detained for defending Chrys, who quickly starts crushing on her. Once the kids leave and Craven blows the whistle, all hell breaks loose. You see: the whistle helps your death find you.
Initially the lore behind the whistle, as explained by Horse’s collector grandmother Ivy (Michelle Fairley), seems simple enough. A version of a victim who died the way they were intended to by fate hunts down their current self if they blow the whistle. Eventually, the movie realizes that setup means that we can only have one potential victim at a time, and then things get far more convoluted than they need to. Hardy (The Nun, The Hallow) clearly has ambitions of a slick visual style with shocking scares, but never quite gets there. There are certainly moments where a creepy face screams as it comes into frame with an accompanying BOOM noise to make sure everybody in the room jumps, but usually the actual visuals are lackluster. There are a couple of amusing kills (the most gruesome being a blatant throwback to A Nightmare on Elm Street) but the dodgy CGI ensures that most of them are undersold.
There are clear Final Destination influences in Whistle that are hamstrung by how limiting the central gimmick is. Sure, we see the remnants of these kids’ potential future horrific deaths on their stalkers, but those apparitions don’t really have powers. They chase you and eventually catch up. Only one tear through a Harvestfest Halloween Haymaze somewhat takes advantage of this but it is still a slower version of a sequence and setting that we’ve seen in teen horror movies for decades.
Whistle’s cast is unremarkable. Keen was a revelation as the rage fueled X-23 but she seems to have dulled with the onset of adulthood. She has a striking look, but she just doesn’t lend much personality to a character that has a fraught backstory that could’ve been fun to play with. Yang, Swaby, Skovbye and Nélisse are your standard generic high school supporting characters. Each of them embodies their archetype and nothing more. Nick Frost has a bit of fun chewing them out but his engaging presence doesn’t last. It is admirable to have a queer love story between Keen and Nélisse at the center of this story without it being a huge spectacle, but it can only have so much impact when their characters are so difficult to invest in. I’m sure that some of these young actors will re-appear and show more potential than they do in Whistle but Hardy simply doesn’t connect with them.
Whistle is one of the first Shudder efforts to have nearly identical energy to something out of Blumhouse. A bare bones central hook unfolds exactly as expected. I’ve missed horror films that are content with being simple stories, but they need to be inhabited by colorful characters who are fun to root for or watch meet their demise. The team behind Whistle has no understanding or interest in current teens and their culture. This ensemble could’ve just as easily been dying by whistle blow in 1986, 2006, or 2026. A few kids may sneak into this and have an enjoyable time but in a year from now, they’ll be sitting in a circle going “what was that stupid horror movie we saw?”
