A movie that has quietly slipped its way into mainstream cinemas is WHISTLE, a fun little horror movie that has a good cast and premise and delivers well for fans of genre cinema.
About: A misfit group of unwitting high school students stumble upon a cursed object, an ancient Aztec Death Whistle. They discover that blowing the whistle and the terrifying sound it emits will summon their future deaths to hunt them down. As the body count rises, the friends investigate the origins of the deadly artifact in a desperate effort to stop the horrifying chain of events that they have set in motion.
Reaction: A surprisingly effective Dead Teenage Horror Movie that has a LOT of smart writing, good characters and is also a throwback to the old-school horror pictures that I grew up with. The movie’s writer is Owen Egerton, someone that I have met many times on the Austin, Texas film circuit at SxSW’s Midnighters selection along with the same city’s fall Fantastic Fest, and I can clearly tell that Egerton has inspiration from a lot of the genre movies that play there. I can feel the “notes” that this movie takes and what it does and doesn’t do. I quite liked the set-up which ties in with a lot of the typical horror motifs but doesn’t apologize for it, then makes it up with more interesting characters and even a few surprise jump scares.
Though I am always happy to see French Canadian Sophie Nelisse here plays a character with more three dimensions and not playing the archetype, the real star is Dafne Keen, who fully channels Rachel Leigh Cook from the 90s horror genre here in a very effective and unique performance. You may remember her as young X-23 in LOGAN from several years ago (and since reprised in DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE in 2024) and the two stand out much more than other recent horror pictures involving youth.
WHISTLE surprised me as I watched it, then as the credits ran I also realized the pure talent behind the scenes. Though coming out in kind of a dumping ground for movie releases in the early year, this is quite a bit of dark fun and deserves to find a cult audience down the road.
WHISTLE is now playing in cinemas.
Note: there is also another movie out right now playing the festival circuit called WHISTLE, about a professional whistling competition. It was a doc that I saw and enjoyed at TIFF in 2025 and hope it also comes out later this year, mostly to confuse people.