- Release year: 2025
- Director: Corin Hardy.
- Producers: David Gross, Whitney Brown, Macdara Kelleher, and John Keville.
- Screenplay by: Owen Egerton.
- Cinematography by: Björn Charpentier.
- Music by: Doomphonic.
Synopsis: a Mesopotamian whistle of the dead makes its way into a high school, causing the death of all those who hear its sound.
Shotgun Commentary: the laziest approach to curse-themed horror one can conceive.
Review
Whistle is a movie about a whistle that calls the dead… that’s about as exciting as it gets. Don’t try to find anything revolutionary or novel about it. It is literally just a bunch of teens messing with an object they do not understand and getting traumatised or killed as a result. You can call it The Evil Dead (1981), The Outing (1987), Ouija (2014), Talk To Me (2022), Tarot (2024)…
Nonsense at its best
In this particular story, we follow Chrysanthemum (Dafne Keen), or Chrys, as she likes to be called. Chrys is a girl so absolutely self-centred and unaware of her surroundings that she finds an ancient Mesopotamian whistle and decides that detention is the best place to pull it out to observe it.
Since it has already given her the attention she wanted, she has no problem parting with the antique when her teacher (Nick Frost) decides to keep it without so much as bothering to give her an actual excuse. Naturally, the high school teacher knows how to read Mesopotamian—as all high school teachers do…—so he reads the message in the whistle in nary two minutes of having it in his hand, and Google Translate does the rest.
A little more based on real human behaviour, Chrys’ cousin Rel (Sky Yang) gets the whistle back when the teacher isn’t looking. You probably know what comes next: a teen house party, of course! The best event to make great decisions that will lead to gruesome deaths, like blowing a Mesopotamian death whistle, reading Latin from a book made of human skin, talking to the dead through cards/a Ouija board/a clay hand… you get the drift.
When Rachel met Ross
Much like in all movies with this theme, the characters are completely unrelatable and borderline incomprehensible. Starting with the ever-present cliché heterosexual couple. This must always be formed by a jock and a gorgeous girl that is both physically and mentally out of his league, yet she is somehow too dumb to acknowledge it.
Our lucky couple are Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and Grace (Ali Skovbye), and I know what you are thinking: you have a thousand examples of women settling for way worse than they deserve because society has destroyed their self-esteem and they are incapable of seeing their true worth. Sure, this is not far-fetched, but about his friends? How can anyone voluntarily choose to be with a thoroughly insufferable man with no redeeming qualities whatsoever? He is proof that Stockholm syndrome can happen to an entire group of friends. Next to him, the whistle is a minor hazard. If you had to put up with him every day of your life, you’d call Death too.
Yes, but
To finish up the friend group, you have the cliché queer couple formed by a girl who thinks she’s very special and another girl who believes her; and the heterosexual couple’s third wheel, who also happens to be the edgy girl’s cousin. Lots of horror films nowadays seem to have a checklist of diversity that they have to tick, and they do so religiously, which is fine. But when is someone going to make a checklist for character depth?
Bringing a much-awaited diversity into a movie genre only to have the characters be as plain and forgettable as always feels like a complete let-down. Can anyone who’s ever seen a real teenager please start giving masterclasses to scriptwriters all over the world?
All in all, Whistle does exactly what you do NOT want to see in a curse-themed horror movie. It piles up all the clichés available and presents them to you one by one. Character grieving a horrible tragedy that will only be cured with a near-death experience? Check. Special effects that have no business being that cool in a movie this bad? Check. A portrayal of “old people” by people who have clearly never seen anyone over eighty? Check and check.
If you want to have a few laughs with friends, by all means, waste your time on this. But if you are looking for proper horror, you are better off using your Netflix subscription to watch Undertone (2025).
Advice to take from this movie:
- Don’t use cursed objects until someone else has done so first… far away from you.
- Apparently, 15 seconds is an acceptable grieving time for the death of a cousin.
- If you stop someone from saving themselves and they immediately die, it is, in fact, very much your fault that they are dead.
What’s your take? Have you watched Whistle? Don’t hesitate to let me know your thoughts in the comments section below, or leave a message on my contact page! For more reviews and cinema-related articles, check out the rest of my blog! 😀