Whistle review – a smart, sympathetic spin on the cursed-artefact horror

On the surface, this teen-courting, genre-savvy Irish-Canadian horror effort looks like the kind of project ushered into production after the Philippou brothers’ cursed-artefact chiller Talk to Me cleared up at the box office. However, rather than suburban Australia, writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy relocate us to an autumnal, Springsteen-ready North American steeltown, where artsy high-schooler Chrys (Dafne Keen) inherits the locker of the star basketballer we’ve just seen flambeed in a prologue. The deadly doodad she finds there is a skull-shaped Aztec whistle with either “summon the dead” or “summon your dead” (there’s some linguistic quibbling) inscribed on the side. Naturally she puts it back, and everybody lives happily ever after.

I kid, of course. For a while, the horror element is less in-your-face than it was in the pummelling Antipodean predecessor, but whistleblowing soon makes everyone’s worst fears about dying literal. That development gives Hardy’s increasingly bloody kill scenes a Final Destination-like piquancy: your heart can only go out to the boy racer who perishes via car crash in his upstairs bedroom. One similarity to the Philippous’ film is the sympathy for insecure, troubled teens who couldn’t seem more unlike the usual disposable jocks and prom queens. Egerton observes courtship rituals with tenderness, quietly foregrounding Chrys’s struggles to come out to upright classmate Ellie (Sophie Nélisse); beneath the looming shadow of death, this is an attempt to live one’s truest life.

British director Hardy has far more fun here than he did with 2018’s mechanical franchise entry The Nun. He runs with a solid in-joke – naming objects, places and Nick Frost’s doomed teacher Mr Craven after noted horror directors – and pushes a sequence involving a labyrinthine straw maze, surely beyond the actual resources of a small town harvest festival, towards the pleasingly surreal. If the film can’t successfully integrate a loose-end preacher-slash-drug dealer (Percy Hynes White), elsewhere it pulls off the deft trick of being familiar without seeming derivative, with scenes you remember from films you like, occasionally with a novel twist. Enough for Friday or Saturday night enjoyment, certainly.