On the surface, this teen-courting, genre-savvy Irish-Canadian horror effort looks like the kind of project ushered into production after the Philippou brothers' cursed-artefact chiller Talk to Me cleared up at the box office. However, rather than suburban Australia, writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy relocate us to an autumnal, Springsteen-ready North American steeltown, where artsy high-schooler Chrys inherits the locker of the star basketballer we've just seen flambeed in a prologue.
A Deadly Discovery with Ancient Origins
The deadly doodad she finds there is a skull-shaped Aztec whistle with either "summon the dead" or "summon your dead" inscribed on the side. Naturally she puts it back, and everybody lives happily ever after. I kid, of course. For a while, the horror element is less in-your-face than it was in the pummelling Antipodean predecessor, but whistleblowing soon makes everyone's worst fears about dying literal.
Final Destination Meets Tender Adolescence
That development gives Hardy's increasingly bloody kill scenes a Final Destination-like piquancy: your heart can only go out to the boy racer who perishes via car crash in his upstairs bedroom. One similarity to the Philippous' film is the sympathy for insecure, troubled teens who couldn't seem more unlike the usual disposable jocks and prom queens.
Egerton observes courtship rituals with tenderness, quietly foregrounding Chrys's struggles to come out to upright classmate Ellie. Beneath the looming shadow of death, this is an attempt to live one's truest life. British director Hardy has far more fun here than he did with 2018's mechanical franchise entry The Nun.
Creative Flourishes and Surreal Sequences
He runs with a solid in-joke – naming objects, places and Nick Frost's doomed teacher Mr Craven after noted horror directors – and pushes a sequence involving a labyrinthine straw maze, surely beyond the actual resources of a small town harvest festival, towards the pleasingly surreal.
If the film can't successfully integrate a loose-end preacher-slash-drug dealer, elsewhere it pulls off the deft trick of being familiar without seeming derivative, with scenes you remember from films you like, occasionally with a novel twist. Enough for Friday or Saturday night enjoyment, certainly.
Release Dates and Final Verdict
Whistle is out now in the United States, on 12 February in Australia and 13 February in the United Kingdom. This smart, sympathetic spin on the cursed-artefact horror blends Final Destination-style deaths with a tender portrait of anxious adolescence, making it a worthy addition to the genre for those seeking both scares and substance.
