Whistle Review – A smart and sympathetic spin on the horror of cursed artefacts | film

HeyOn the surface, this teen-targeted, genre-defining Irish-Canadian horror effort looks like the kind of project that went into production after the Filippo brothers’ damned Talk to Me was wiped out at the box office. However, instead of suburban Australia, writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy transport us to an autumnal North American town ready for spring, where artistically gifted high school student Chris (Dafne Keen) inherits the locker of the basketball star we just saw engulfed in flames in the film’s intro. The deadly doodad I found there is an Aztec whistle in the shape of a skull that says either “summon the dead” or “summon your dead” (there is some linguistic quirk) on the side. Naturally, things return to normal, and everyone lives happily ever after.

I’m a kid, of course. For a while, the horror element is less in-your-face than it was in its Antipodean predecessor, but the whistleblowing soon makes everyone’s worst fears about death literal. This twist gives Hardy’s increasingly gory murder scenes a Final Destination-like flavor: Your heart can only go out to the boy racer who is killed in a car crash in his upstairs bedroom. One similarity to Philippous’s film is the sympathy for troubled, insecure teens who couldn’t seem more different from the usual jocks and prom queens. Egerton observes the courtship rituals with tenderness, quietly underscoring Chris’s struggle to land his straight colleague Ellie (Sophie Nélis); Under the looming shadow of death, this is an attempt to live one’s truest life.

British director Hardy is having a lot more fun here than he did with 2018’s mechanical franchise entry The Nun. He runs with a solid gag—naming objects, places, and Nick Frost’s doomed mentor Mr. Craven after famous horror directors—and pushes a sequence involving a straw maze, certainly beyond the actual resources of a small-town harvest festival, toward delightful surrealism. If the film can’t successfully integrate the loose-lipped preacher drug dealer (Percy Hines White), elsewhere it pulls off the nifty trick of being familiar without seeming derivative, with scenes you remember from movies you love, sometimes with a new twist. Definitely enough to enjoy on a Friday or Saturday night.