Whistle- Movie Review
I remember seeing someone use an Aztec death whistle on a clip from the Joe Rogan podcast many, many years ago. That sound was terrifying. It’s a whistle used in warfare to emulate the screams and groans of dying or mortally wounded people and psychologically scare the opposition during the darks of the night. In warfare, that is scary. In the movie Whistle, it’s far from it.
That’s not to say there isn’t some horror fun to be had with this new horror flick from director Corin Hardy (The Nun). The film’s premise is centred around a death whistle that is discovered in a high-school, and when blown, those who can hear it are then on a ticking clock counting down to their gruesome deaths. Deaths that manifest themselves in gruesome visions of future demise – walking burnt carcasses, blood-coughing cancers, a brutal car accident. And it’s up to a group of unlikely high-schoolers to figure out how to break the curse and beat death at its own game.
Yeah – it’s very Final Destination in nature. And that honestly works in the film’s favour as Hardy creates some truly nasty death scenes, especially in the second half of the film that earn the film’s MA15+ rating. There is a creativity to a handful of the deaths that do feel fresh and unique (in a wonderfully grotesque way) to the horror genre. Unfortunately, it’s these creative kills that serve as the only real redeeming factor of Whistle.
The narrative itself, following an eclectic group of highschoolers ranging from grunge outliers to annoying jerks, doesn’t stray far away from familiar plotlines that have served films like Final Destination before, or really any mid-budget New Line horror flick from the 2000s. The familiarity means there isn’t a lot of excitement waiting behind certain twists and turns, but it does mean that you’re in serviceable hands that deliver a decent story.
The characters are, for the most part, really annoying. There isn’t a lot of redeeming factors about the characters themselves, and the performances from actors like Dafne Keen and Percy Hines White (both who have shone in previous projects like Logan and My Old Ass) don’t really give a lot to the film to make the surface level characters more interesting.
Whistle would have probably been a smash-hit in the 2000s. The issue is that we’ve seen 100 horror films like this before, all made in the 2000s when they felt fresh and original. The structure and characters are formulaic, and despites some cool death scenes, even the attempt at a new horror weapon in the whistle itself isn’t utilised well enough to scare.
Whistle is in Australian cinemas February 12
