Working from a script by Owen Egerton (Blood Fest), the frequent Gangs of London director’s latest feature doesn’t offer anything you haven’t seen before. But that’s by design. It’s not trying to blaze any new trails, it’s here to deliver a fun, entertaining throwback don’t-mess-with-the-cursed-relic horror romp. The whole team knows precisely what they’re here to do, and how to do it, and they get down to business post haste. This is tight, briskly paced, and gory as hell, full of spurting and snapping and meat-grindering galore. When a character says, “What if I don’t want to die?” and another replies, “Then you shouldn’t have been born,” as ominous music swells, it practically dares you not to have a good time.
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You can tell Chrysanthemum “Chrys” Willet (Dafne Keen, Logan) is messed up and an outsider because she has scraggly dyed black hair, chipped nail polish, and wears a surplus army jacket. What? She collects records? She also has an alluded-to troubled past, which compels her to move from Chicago to a decrepit rust-belt town to live with her cousin Rel (Sky Yang, Rebel Moon). Presumably there’s some sort of adult supervision, though we never see them. Whistle has no time for parents as anything more than an abstract off-screen concept. Chrys falls in with a loose crew that includes medical Mary Sue, Ellie (Sophie Nelisse, Yellowjackets)—seriously, she is a teenager who carries an EMT-grade med kit in the trunk of her car.
The hook of the film is that once this whistle has been blown, it calls death to you. Say you’re fated to die of old age at 93, now you’ll wither away tomorrow. If destiny deems you’re to be eaten by sharks during spring break junior year of college, guess what? It’s very Final Destination, death-is-inescapable in that way. Once the whistle sounds, spooky things start happening, like Chrys and company seeing shadowy figures lurking in the distance or snippet visions of their impending demise. And, of course, they do what they can to stave off their imminent deaths as they drop one by one.
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Whistle hits all the genre hallmarks. Someone sees a glimpse of their death while in a crowded auditorium and has a momentary freakout. Lights flicker in a lonely high school hallway as a nebulous figure stalks its teen prey. There’s a creepy old lady exposition machine (Michelle Fairley, Game of Thrones), and at one point a young woman does bikini-clad homework in a hot tub, because this is a teen horror movie. Hell, the teacher Mr. Craven (Nick Frost, Shaun of the Dead) smokes Cronenberg brand cigarettes.
But while the film plays familiar notes, it plays them well, and it has a damn fine time doing it. It’s playful with beats and tropes, but without being winky and trying to be meta and overthink things. It doesn’t want to be Scream, it wants to be the movies that inspired Scream, and it largely succeeds. Egerton’s script, adapted from his own short story, also injects a few unique bits to set it apart. Prominent among these is a thread with Percy Hynes White (Wednesday, My Old Ass), who plays drug-dealing, wrath-of-god-style teen preacher. It’s hard not to imagine other versions where he’s more of a presence.
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The cast also keeps the film from being another middling addition into the teen splatter canon. Chrys may be a collection of external cliches, but Keen gives her a depth of feeling as she quietly navigates lingering trauma, the terror of starting over, and, of course, being in the middle of a horror movie. The same goes for Nelisse, and together, this core duo has an undeniable chemistry and on-screen charisma. The supporting players also have more to do than simply exist. Rel has a well-thought out, developed arc of his own, and even the stock “hot girl” (Ali Skovbye) and “horny jock” (Jhaleil Swaby) have texture, nuance, and pathos. It’s so much more engaging when you’re interested in the characters beyond their gory deaths. Don’t worry, there are plenty of gory deaths to go around. It’s this and the moments of earnest angst, awkward flirting, and grounded bits of teenage life that make this lived in and authentic.
Whistle never veers from the path, but that doesn’t mean it’s not well worth your time. Thanks to strong performances from talented young actors, there are compelling characters to cling to. Hardy and company craft a slick, nice-looking, briskly paced story—the set designers clearly enjoyed themselves, dropping all manner of details in the background for eagle-eyed viewers to pick out. Hell, it even ends with an Iron Maiden song over the credits. Not destined to blow minds or be enshrined as a modern classic, Whistle is a solid, bloody, fun-as-hell horror excursion. [Grade: B]
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