I get pretty spoilery in this post so if you don’t like those, stop reading.
It begins with a scene that takes place before the real movie sets in, designed to give you a little fright before it has to do the boring work of developing characters and building a plot.
There is a high school basketball game. Our presumed heroes are down by a few points, and there are only a few seconds left. Our presumed main character takes the ball and makes a basket, narrowing the margin to one more point. Then he sees something in the stands. Smoke billows, and there is a strange figure standing there. He shakes it off and gets the ball again. He runs. He shoots. He…the basketball does that thing it always does in basketball movies where it bounces back and forth around the rim in slow motion before it goes in. While it is doing that, a smoky, charcoal creature appears before the boy.
He runs to the locker room, takes out some kind of relic, and begs for his life. The creature appears again, and the boy smashes the relic. The creature disappears. Hurrah. The rest of the team comes in, and our boy takes a shower. Then he’s burnt to a crisp by the monster.
Flash forward three months. Nobody cares about that dead kid. He isn’t our hero. Neither are any of his friends or family. He exists so we can so the film can start with a bang. Oh, and I guess so our actual main character can easily find the relic.
She’s Chrys Willet (Dafne Keen), and she’s new to the school. She gets the dead boy’s locker, and even though it has been three months since he died, and presumably that was a tragic event for the school, no one has bothered to clean out his locker. She grabs the relic and puts it in her bag.
She makes a few friends who seem to be the only people at this school. Seriously, she goes to her first class, and the only students are like the five people she just met in the hallway. They aren’t really her friends either. She just met them, and two of them were mean to her. One stared at her like she knew who Chrys was, but she doesn’t like her. The other is her cousin. They will become friends in the next scene because the film needs them to be. It needs some characters it can kill off to keep things exciting.
The relic does look cool. It’s kept inside this black crystal-like box, but the real thing has a groovy skull on one side and a little whistle thing on the other. When you blow it, death comes knocking. You see, when you are born, your death is also born. Death spends its, um, life looking for you. When it finds you at the slated time, it kills you. But the whistle summons your death early. Each person’s death looks like them at the slated time of their death, and if death comes early, you get killed in the manner you were always going to die.
This makes little sense but does create some fun kills. So, let’s say you are supposed to get run over by a bus in twenty years. You blow the whistle, and death comes calling sooner than expected. When it finds you, your body gets mutilated just like it would if you were hit by that bus.
I’m probably saying too much. I’ll have to add a spoiler tag at the front. But honestly, this film is dumb. I can’t really recommend it anyway.
Our heroes (and us in the audience) learn this lore through the typical creepy old lady character we always find in this type of movie who collects ancient artifacts and knows all about spooky spells.
This movie reminded me of The Craft. Partially because it is about a weird new girl coming to a school, bonding with some newfound, and fighting supernatural powers. But also because it really isn’t that great, but I fully suspect there’s a group of teenagers who will become extremely nostalgic about it in twenty years.
At least The Craft took some time developing its characters and developed its story. This film just throws everything together without bothering to make something cohesive.
Nick Frost is in it, and that’s always a good thing. He plays the teacher who is the first adult to get a look at the relic and figure something out about it. But then he exits the film way too early. So much so I’m surprised someone of his status agreed to the role. Sophie Nélisse is one of the friends who becomes the love interest. That seems to be her thing now. But I’m here for it.
Whistle is a dumb movie. It doesn’t take the time it needs to tell a good story. Instead it just jumps from scene to scene, advancing the plot in very familiar ways. But it never made me care about these people and their story. It tries very hard to be cool. Chrys is a goth and a lesbian, and she listens to bands like The Cure and Iron Maiden on vinyl. At one point the film has her lying on her back, the camera shooting her from above, her super cool records neatly laid out around her head like a halo. Like I say, this is a film a certain type of teen will identify with, and I look forward to their essays on how misunderstood it was when I’m a much older man.
But the thing is, I kind of had a good time. The actors are decent. The directing does what it needs to do. The kills are pretty fun, even if they do use too much CGI. I won’t watch this again, and I certainly won’t feel nostalgia over it in a couple of decades, but I don’t hate myself for watching it.
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