Directed by Corin Hardy | Written by Owen Egerton | ▲▲▲ | in Cinemas
This Hamilton, Ontario-shot Canadian/Irish co-pro somehow manages to be deeply silly and a still pretty entertaining and effective teen horror. It knows all the genre’s hits and isn’t beyond stealing a few ideas when it suits, but it also playful enough to hold the interest to an impressively gory finale.
Those big hits certainly include the Final Destination franchise, and any number of supernatural horrors circling around a cursed object. With that in mind, you might be thinking Whistle is in league with the Philippou’s Talk To Me, the recent horror about teenagers getting a vision of hell by shaking an evil petrified hand, but you’d be wrong — this isn’t nearly as frightening as that picture, but it’s a whole lot more goofy.
The enchanted thing this time is an Aztec Death Whistle, which apparently is an actual ancient Meso-American artifact used in ritual sacrifices — the things the internet tells me.
It shows up in the locker belonging to the new goth kid in school, Chrys (Dafne Keen). She’s a troubled teen with addiction issues, recently moved in with her cousin, Rel (Sky Yang), though no parental or avuncular units are ever introduced.
At school she gets right into a rumble with asshole jock, Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and his girlfriend, Grace (Ali Skovbye), while aspiring medical student, Ellie (Sophie Nélisse, recently appearing in Heated Rivalry) tries to help. The five of them all earn detention from Mr Craven (what are you doing in this movie, Nick Frost?) and end up being friends afterwards like that brief detention was actually The Breakfast Club. It’s been awhile since I was in high school but I’m pretty sure that’s not how social cliques work. Meanwhile, we’re introduced to a drug-dealing religious nut, Noah (Percy Hynes White) operating out of a creepy looking church up the road. Maybe he’s gonna be important later, who can say.
Anyway, back to the Death Whistle. If you hear it, it’s like a call to your death somewhere off into the future. However you die, that fate gets hurried up, like your own death is hunting you. The lesson here is if you see someone who looks like you, except it’s your own rotted corpse, run like hell.
Turns out a number of these characters meet horrible ends, though part of the fun of this thing is figuring out from the condition of those evil looking shrouds how they will meet their ends. Chrys — short for Chrysanthemum, by the way — starts to get friendly with Ellie, leading to kind of a sweet romance that you’ll wish the movie made more time for. They’re the first to really believe this whistle is bad news and try to figure out whether there’s a way to escape your death stalker.
If you’re willing to get on board with all if this goofiness, you’ll find a few things to enjoy here. A mid-movie set piece at the local fairground includes the world most labyrinthine haunted house/ hay bale maze — makes you wonder how this town could afford to run electricity to this enormous operation.
A few deft ’80s needle drops (cuz why not if you’re giving Breakfast Club vibes) include Iron Maiden’s “Killers” and Concrete Blonde’s “Joey,” and Hardy generates a couple impressive visual moments along the way — even the ones that are clearly lifted from Get Out‘s Sunken Place look cool.
Mostly it’s the cast of former child actors that elevates this material: Keen has proven her chops since Logan, Nélisse has been solid since The Book Thief and has future star written all over her, and Hynes White’s been terrific in everything from Cast No Shadow to My Old Ass. They make this spooky tale a lot of fun, almost despite itself.
