Whistle review

By David Dent

To date reviewers of Corin Hardy’s ‘cursed object’ fright flick have commented on the movie’s Final Destination style victim outcomes and its similarities to the Philippou brothers winner Talk to Me, while ignoring the obvious source inspiration (and the clue’s in the title); the 1904 short story by British supernatural writer M R James, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’.

In James’s tale an amateur archaeologist finds a buried whistle containing a strange inscription which, when blown, summons a devilish entity to stalk him. Hardy’s movie may increase the numbers of the cursed – and apply a few bells and whistles (pun intended) of his own – but it’s essentially a flashy remake.

Students at a small-town high school have their number increased by one when brooding Chrys (Dafne Keen), a girl fresh out of rehab and with a dark family past, joins their class; she’s also gay and likes 1980s complaint rock, using her late father’s record collection as grief therapy. 

While emptying her assigned locker of the contents left by a previous student (who we’ve seen burned to a crisp in the movie’s noisy prologue) she finds a strange artefact which their quirky archaeology teacher (played by Brit Nick Frost; a James nod, methinks) quickly confiscates and works out is a valuable Aztec death whistle. Unable to resist he has a blow and is quickly dead.

The rest of the class, given the task of writing about Aztec belief systems as a detention punishment, get together, nicking the whistle from school and, of course, Chrys blows into it; their fates are sealed.

Hardy wraps all this up in a YA teen romance plot that spends as much time with the anxieties of the students as it does with the scary stuff, including Chrys’s ‘will they won’t they’ crush on classmate Emma (Sophie Nélisse) and some testosterone tension featuring members of the local football team and a drug dealing vicar (Percy Hynes White).

If you can ignore the silliness Whistle zips along, with Hardy making up the mythology as he goes (but leaving room for the inevitable sequel) and fitting in some ingenious kills (the curse involves a version of the victims killing themselves, in a manner I dare not divulge). None of this is to be taken too seriously, I’ll wager; I mean, when did you last see a movie which product places famous director names, like ‘Cronenberg’ and ‘Verhoeven’, on cigarette packets and company signs?