Joel on Film

There are flashes—and sometimes more—of inspiration in Whistle that suggest the type of movie this could have been, and one of them happens to be among the gnarliest horror-movie deaths perhaps in the history of the genre. Without giving too much away at the start, what seals it is an expert melding of digital and practical effects, as a character is lifted into the air and we’re made to watch while his body folds unnaturally, splits at the arm and head, and is repeatedly pulverized by an apparently invisible but also sort of semi-solid force. The description of it is alarming, but truly, no such description can spoil the effect of watching it happen.

It’s a real shame, indeed, to criticize the movie that surrounds this scene, because it gets at the neat concept behind the Death MacGuffin (copyright pending) at the center of director Corin Hardy’s movie. In this case, it’s an ancient Mayan whistle, made of heavy stone and encased in an intense piece of hardware that, in the opening scene, cannot truly be destroyed even after it is shattered into a hundred pieces. That would be too easy, obviously, and so, after burning an innocent high-school basketball player alive, we pick up with the whistle as it passes itself off to a new victim.

She is Chrys (Dafne Keen), short for “Chrysanthemum,” and has arrived at that same school under a certain amount of heat for some recent and unfortunate business. Chrys struggles with a drug habit, and worse, she houses some guilt over the fact that an overdose led to a car accident in which her dad was killed. Her cousin Rel (Sky Yang) is kind enough to oversee her transition into a new school and social sphere, which is about as tough as it sounds.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that there’s actually nothing all that interesting about Chrys as a horror-movie protagonist, since she fits into the type of traumatized and troubled teen in which these movies commonly barter. The only difference between Chrys and some of those others is that the screenplay, written by Owen Egerton, has shifted what might have previously been a side character into the forefront. It’s not as clever or subversive as it sounds, mostly because the trauma that defines her grief is still, especially by the end, just a gimmick.

If there is a ray of hope here, it’s her Meet Cute with Ellie (Sophie Nélisse), a pretty girl in Rel’s friend group who is able to ground Chrys’ sullenness with strength. Keen and Nélisse have such naturalistic chemistry that one immediately recognizes just how unfortunate it is for the budding romance to be trapped in a generic horror-movie scenario like this, in which Chrys finds the death whistle in her locker and it winds up in Rel’s possession at a hot-tub gathering. Blowing the whistle, naturally, leads to some nasty consequences for everyone in its immediate vicinity.

In addition to Chrys, Rel and Ellie, that includes mutual friends Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and Grace (Ali Skovbye), who are dating in spite of Rel’s crush on Grace, although none of that actually matters in the long run. We must remember—and the movie is helpful to remind us—that these characters should be considered genre fodder for our grossed-out entertainment. That starts with poor Mr. Craven (Nick Frost), a teacher who takes a fatal interest in the whistle when he temporarily confiscates it, to his demise.

That sense of doom continues with tired routine, as each of the teenagers is knocked off in ascending order of narrative importance and the remaining ones try various methods of avoiding death (Michelle Fairley makes a glorified cameo as an old, dying woman who can helpfully explain the lore, the rules, and the nifty cheat code). Whistle has a neat MacGuffin, to be fair, with a cool new way of killing characters off (though some avenues, such as rapid aging, are a lot less different than the method vaguely described in the opening), but it never adequately provides more than that for anything to be elevated beyond the exercise.

Rating: ** (out of ****)