When troubled high-schooler Chrys (Dafne Keen) and her pals find — and blow — an Aztec death whistle, something evil comes calling.
In 1904, British writer M.R. James released his debut collection, Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary, which included the classic tale Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad. A masterpiece of slow-burn dread, it features what is perhaps horror’s first cursed whistle. Updating the concept to 21st-century New York State, director Corin Hardy (The Nun) and writer Owen Egerton (Mercy Black) aren’t shy about their influences — nodding in the film to several major directors (Nick Frost’s teacher is called Mr Craven), and re-purposing ideas from Final Destination and It Follows — but the debt to James isn’t directly referenced, a more understated influence.
It’s about the only thing that is understated here. For Whistle is the kind all-guns-blazing genre flick that will do just about anything to get a reaction, from creepy stalking sequences to moments of inventive splatter. A show-stopping opener sees school basketball ace Horse (Stephen Kalyn) menaced by a scary, scorched-out figure during a game. Fast-forward six months and new girl Chrys (short for Chrysanthemum, played by Dafne Keen) finds his whistle in her locker.
Even when things threaten to turn silly, Hardy and his team really sell the danger.
Since 2017’s Logan, Keene has been a star in the making, and Chrys, a recovering addict who recently lost her father, is an appealing, resourceful lead. Her gang — nerdy cousin Rel (Sky Yang), sensible love interest Ellie (Sophie Nélisse), smart rich-girl Grace (Tiera Skovbye) and jock-with-problems Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) — are given just enough juice to hold our interest. So when Grace blows the whistle and death starts picking them off one by one in a variety of guises, you actually care — or at least remember — what happens to them.
Set in a dismal steel town, the film has a powerful sense of place, all smoke-spewing chimneys, hellish furnaces and industrial ruin. And even when things threaten to turn silly, Hardy and his team really sell the danger. An atmospheric set-piece at a harvest festival features an incredible drone shot across a creepy maze, the party somehow looking inviting and forbidding at the same time.
If there’s a problem inherent in the material it’s that few of the main characters actually choose to blow the whistle — they’re just innocent bystanders — so any sense of this being a Jamesian-style warning to the curious, or a Talk To Me-inspired drugs metaphor, is missing. Even so, Hardy and Egerton serve up a series of kills so gnarly — think geysers of blood and mangled bodies — they’ll delight horror-heads. Not very M.R. James — but a bloody good time.
It may come dressed in borrowed robes, but this is a no-holds-barred horror with real bite — and surely the start of a new franchise.
