Death toots as it pleases.
Having had a turn at playing in someone else’s toy box, bringing a zippy sense of Scooby-Doo to the gothic side quests of the Conjuring universe in The Nun, Whistle sees Corin Hardy return to what he does best, weaving inspirations and homages together to deliver something if not new then at least fun to watch. Here, he explores the well-trodden ground of the “cursed object” splatter horror, delivering a film that blends its influences like a well curated mix-tape.
When a group of high schoolers stumble upon an ancient Aztec death whistle six months after the unexplained death by flambé of the school’s star basketball player, it appears that history is about to repeat – and revenge itself. The whistle, once blown, summons death to strike down everyone in earshot of the sound in suitably ironic fashion.
It only takes a couple of careless toots to unleash a particularly grisly brand of mayhem on the ailing industrial town of Pellington. The film wastes little time moving from curiosity to carnage, leaning into the creative potential of its premise with a streak of mean-spirited invention.
Dafne Keen leads the movie as Chrys, a troubled newcomer with a dark past who comes into possession of the whistle by inheriting the locker of the recently immolated basketballer but Whistle wastes little time in assembling a solid cast of whistle fodder for death to snack on. There’s Dean the jock (Jhaleil Swaby), Grace, the popular girl (Ali Skovbye), and Rel, Chrys’ geeky cousin (Sky Yang). The group is rounded out by Sophie Nélisse’s Ellie, an aspiring Doctor and Chrys’ love interest, a romance that’s played out in a pleasingly unfussy way, their chemistry carrying the tentative romance as written with a lightness of touch and giving the story’s most authentic element. They may be surrounded by horror movie archetypes but the cast are so likeable it hardly matters. Nick Frost and Michelle Fairley are good value in their limited roles, delivering the needed exposition with the necessary gravitas and, in Frost’s case, affable cynicism. Whistle is a very contained story in that it focuses almost exclusively on its diminishing group of teens and there’s hardly any intervention from authority figures as the deaths – and mysteries – mount up and the closest the film comes to a peripheral threat is the somewhat underwritten local youth pastor Noah Haggerty (Percy Hynes White), who has a sideline in dealing drugs to his flock.
There’s a superficial quality to Whistle’s treatment of all its characters and it sometimes struggles to reconcile its winking Easter eggs and homages with its more sombre attempts to interrogate Chrys’s history of grief and drug abuse, something that’s more often mentioned than really explored but then again Whistle doesn’t seem set out to be elevated horror, it’s a carnival ride, a thrilling rollercoaster of gruesome kills and chilling atmosphere. The kills are creative and on occasion spectacular and even when the film’s internal logic gets a little bit fuzzy, there’s a buzz to proceedings that carries things through.
It’s helped enormously by Corin Hardy and cinematographer Björn Charpentier’s eye for atmospheric detail. The town of Pellington is portrayed in sepulchral greys and cloudily muted tones during the day and pitch-black nights, punctuated only by the infernal fires of the steel mill, turning small town America into a modern-day Mordor in industrial decline. There’s also a lingering sense of timelessness to the film’s aesthetic. Were it not for the anachronistic presence of the likes of Keen and Frost, this could easily be a classic nineties horror finally getting a theatrical release and I mean that as a compliment. It feels like it has nostalgic affection built in already, no doubt the result of its skilful blending of influences from the likes of golden oldies Flatliners, The Crow and Final Destination as well as more recent inspirations such as It Follows and Talk To Me.
Whistle doesn’t, obviously, revolutionise the supernatural splatter genre, but it manages to be a competently assembled, solidly entertaining horror that reminds us why we used to enjoy these “teens-in-peril” potboilers in the first place: it’s a polished piece of popcorn horror that delivers a few new numbers, alongside its cover versions of other films’ greatest hits.
