Format: Streaming video from AMC on various players.
I had hopes for Whistle, but admittedly, those hopes were based on the poster and what I gathered from a short synopsis. What the story looks like is that some kids find an Aztec death whistle. Shaped like a skull, when blown, it releases a horrible screeching noise. In the film, though, this causes the people who blow the whistle (actually, anyone who hears it) to die horribly. It’s a cool idea, even though it hits the same tropes that we tend to see in movies like this, but just original enough to perhaps give us something new.
The reality is that Whistle is almost certainly a movie that you’ve seen before if you’re at all a fan of horror, and I mean that in no positive way. What we learn is that the whistle doesn’t cause those who hear it to die horribly; it literally summons their death. So, if you were destined to die at 85 of a pulmonary embolism, you die of an embolism essentially now, and if an autopsy is performed, your body will essentially read as being 85. The whistle accelerates your death, and you die in the way you were destined to die. In other words, it’s Final Destination with a bit of a twist. Sure the deaths are essentially pre-ordained, but capital-D Death is the antagonist.
We’re going to start with a death that won’t make sense until we get the plot (although, since you know the basics it will now make sense to you). A high school basketball player hits a game winning shot, but appears to have wild hallucinations of a burning man. Later, after the game, he is attacked by that same burning man in the shower, but everyone else just sees him having caught fire.
From here, we are introduced to the ridiculously-named Chrysanthemum (Dafne Keen), who has moved in with a cousin after the death of her father. With her cousin Rel (Sky Yang), Chrys is introduced to her new school. Naturally, we need to have tension right away, so we learn that Chrys has been given the locker of the basketball player from the opening sequence, and naturally this means that his teammates are going to somehow hold her responsible for him being dead. Or something. This is about as close as we’re going to get to characterization here. Push comes to shove and Chrys kicks our bully Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) in the groin. This is witnessed by teacher Mr. Craven (Nick Frost, who is better than this), and gives everyone detention.
Shortly after this, Chrys finds the eponymous whistle in her locker and almost blows it, but instead goes to detention. With her is Dean, Rel, Dean’s girlfriend and Rel’s crush Grace (Ali Skovbye), and Ellie (Sophie Nélisse), who will be Rel’s love interest. Since Chrys has the whistle on her, it gets confiscated. Because he wants to investigate it, Mr. Craven assigns everyone in detention an essay and kicks them out. Then he blows the whistle, and only he hears it.
This is where we’re going to get the basic plot. Shortly thereafter, we see Mr. Craven attacked by some sort of apparition that looks like him, and as he is attacked, he becomes that apparition. We find out that he was a smoker, and when he is discovered, we are told that he has died of extremely advanced lung cancer. But for us to have a movie, our detention kids need to hear the whistle, so that’s going to happen that night when they are writing that paper they are supposed to do in lieu of detention.
You get the idea. What the film becomes once we get this premise is just waiting for the next person to die. It’s honestly not a bad premise, and a lot could be done with it. What we get instead are just really horrifying deaths. With one exception, everyone dies in a really terrible way—lit on fire, dropped into a metal shredding machine, car accident, etc. So much of the film is just us watching people suffer from their deaths, but more or less just acting them out in front of us. Our car accident victim isn’t teleported to a road—he just has all of the effects of a car accident happen to him in his bedroom.
There’s also a huge issue with the actual deaths, since our victims are frequently going to get a little precursor of what is in store for them. Minor spoiler (but not really), Chrys sees her death as basically herself in the near future with a needle in her arm—clearly she’s going to O.D. This is presented to us as a fait accompli. Knowing that, why wouldn’t she just avoid intravenous drugs from that point forward?
There was real promise in Whistle and it went completely unrealized, opting instead for essentially a movie that puts some nasty deaths forward as a replacement for creating something really original. You’ve seen this before and you’ve seen it better, and that’s a genuine shame. So much more could be done with a haunted Aztec artifact that isn’t just mindless blood and gore. At least in the Final Destination movies, there’s a bunch of red herrings about how someone might die. Here, it’s not just inevitable death, but an inevitable method. Where’s the fun in that?
Why to watch Whistle : There are some very creative deaths?
Why not to watch: It’s Final Destination but less interesting.