Review: WHISTLE

A group of school friends come across an ancient artefact, a Mayan battle whistle that suggests it can summon the dead. One of them, at her boyfriend's goading, blows it. At this stage we've already seen people die horribly after doing this and now it's up to the chums to work it out and do something about it. The closest thing to a spoiler I'll give is the second act revelation that the inscription on the side of the grim object doesn't mean summon the dead but summon your own death. People who blow this whistle meet their deaths but accelerated. If they die of heart failure at seventy that's how they are going to go at seventeen, with their future selves delivering the bads.

I didn't go to the cinema to see this as it looked like yet another late '90s style teen horror with a decent budget and low level scares. Between Scream and its clones that had a good three years before The Blair Witch Project made them irrelevant. While there has been a return to this format with outings like Thanksgiving and Clown in a Cornfield, I just didn't want to sit through another. Add online movie hire and a quick argument-settling choice, we landed on Whistle, come what may. So, how does it do?

As for new themes or tints, a little queerness minus judgement is a welcome addition but by now long established in the genre. Mostly, it's tropes added for a purpose-built unit. However, if you consider how the heyday of the slasher movie was composed of a continual loop of tropes and is now evaluated as a good old day, what fault this film for doing the same. It's greatest debt is to the Final Destination series in which, title by title, a group of friends was stalked by death having cheated it in some way. What Whistle adds is a personal touch where the future death visits the young, leaving the question of fate against potential of the youth. It's not much but it does work.

The cast is up to scratch, led by the charismatic Dafne Keen who binds all behavioural and narrative gaps with promise. The cast is typically more solid than the writing and the direction. We meet the weirdo religious psycho who is also a drug dealer and his persona goes from kindly alpha to bad guy in a few lines of dialogue and believably but we have already clocked him singling out heroine Chrys in the opening school morning scene. His character, eventually, little more than a plot device for the final act, providing stakes that it doesn't really need. But what are we expecting, Ingmar Bergman?

What really brings this one up beyond the level of serviceable is some solid art direction and well crafted kills and, really, if you can't sail through a genre piece on those two features what are you doing in front of this one? It works. You will forget it the next day but it helped the pizza and beer go down and ended under two hours later.

Viewing notes: Whistle is no longer in cinemas but can be hired online or watched as part of a Prime subscription.