Some Creative Deaths Don't Help This Absolute Dud

PLOT: A misfit group of unwitting high school students stumble upon a cursed object, an ancient Aztec Death Whistle. They discover that blowing the whistle and the terrifying sound it emits will summon their future deaths to hunt them down.

REVIEW: One thing that always cracks me up about the horror genre is how much a similar concept can just pop up over and over again. It’s more about execution than originality, and it means we can see some pretty similar films from time to time. And it certainly feels like we’ve seen Whistle many times at this point. The film follows a group of high schoolers who discover an Aztec Death Whistle, which summons their future deaths to hunt them down. Cursed object killing teens? Tarot and Wish Upon are just a couple that come to mind. The story is very “been there, done that,” but really, how is the execution? Eh…

One of the biggest issues with Whistle is that there’s nothing to gain from the death whistle. Usually, there’s some kind of positive outcome that makes the cursed object seem appealing. Instead, these characters use the whistle, even though it has no actual positive gain for them. So why on earth do people keep using it?! There’s nothing to gain, and it looks creepy. Don’t put your mouth on that thing! At one point, two of the characters hook up in the midst of all this death, and it undercuts the severity of the situation even further.

Which is too bad because the concept of your future self, inflicting the way you’ll eventually die on you is pretty interesting. They take a pretty Final Destination-y approach with it, with some over-the-top deaths, but this does go decidedly more supernatural. This is more like ghosts haunting people and then killing them in an extremely violent way. I suppose this whistle was lucky that none of these kids were just going to die peacefully in their sleep, or it’d have made for a pretty underwhelming kill.

The characters in Whistle are extremely weak and feel like 90s movie stereotypes. We’ve got the new girl, her loner cousin, two bullies, and two popular girls who have a connection with non-popular kids. Why are there multiple of the exact same character type? It’s mind-numbingly stupid, and, for a film where you’re supposed to care about these people, I was just waiting for their eventual demise. The dialogue is so unnatural and often results in more unintentionally funny moments than anything relatable. It’s grating to listen to these high schoolers talk.

I’ve always liked Dafne Keen and Sophie Nélisse but they’re not given much to work with here. Their characters fall in love, but it feels very forced and the two have zero chemistry together. It’s nice that the film treats lesbian relationships as everyday versus something to make a grand gesture out of, but there’s no spark there. Nick Frost also shows up as a character who is nothing more than expositional and an easy kill. And I’m not sure if I can ever take a scene seriously when the character is named Horse and people are exclaiming it in terror.

The worst character is easily Percy Hines White’s Noah Haggerty. He’s a youth leader at the local church who is also…a drug dealer? Maybe it could have been handled well, but he’s so over-the-top evil from his first appearance that it’s hard to even take him seriously. His existence just seems to be a way to wrap up something with the ending, with his evilness helping absolve the other characters of any guilt. But, like so many of the people in this film, he’s just a caricature and never feels like a real living human being at any point. Every character is simply a conduit to tell this story, rather than having these events happen to people who actually have some dimension to them.

It’s not all terrible, as there are some great visuals, with The Spiral maze being a real highlight. Director Corin Hardy has an interesting eye, at times. Some of the deaths are very impressive, taking a particularly violent route with the last couple. The car and machinery accidents were particularly brutal and were pulled off well. If the film were more of that and took a little bit more time with the rules of the whistle, it would have had a little more potential. But the rules are terribly inconsistent. One character dies within an hour of the whistle, while others take days. At first, I thought this had to do with the proximity of when their deaths would have occurred, but no. It’s all completely random.

Multiple horror directors are referenced with Muschietti Cigars (for director of IT, Andy) and Mr. Craven (obviously for Wes). I’m sure there were others that I missed, but it’s just another element that makes this feel like a horror film from an earlier decade, as this is such a played-out trope. I really disliked my time with Whistle. Outside of a couple of impressive deaths, this feels like the kind of movie I would have watched on streaming in the 2010s. The characters are downright unlikable, and it’s hard to care about their fates. Every element is so generic, and it’s hard to get invested in a story that feels so half-baked.

Whistle is now playing In Theaters and comes to Shudder later this year.