2 weeks ago
10
Whistle
★★½
(MA) 100 minutes
I felt a modest glow of national pride watching the horror movie Whistle, the clearest demonstration yet that Talk To Me – a fair-sized international hit for the Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou in 2022 – is viewed by other filmmakers as a source worth borrowing from.
Talk To Me concerned a group of bored Adelaide teenagers who unwisely get involved with the occult, using an embalmed hand as a conduit to the next world. Brought to us by the British team of director Corin Hardy (The Nun) and writer Owen Egerton (Blood Fest), Whistle chronicles the series of unfortunate events that unfold after a comparably sinister artifact – an Aztec “death whistle” in the shape of a skull – shows up in the locker of the heroine, Chrysanthanum (Dafne Keen), known as Chrys for short.
The whistle has the power to “summon your death”, as we learn from Ivy Raymore (Michelle Fairley), one of two representatives of the older generation who share the task of supplying exposition (the other is a chain-smoking teacher played by Nick Frost, winkingly named Mr Craven after Wes Craven, director of Scream).
“You didn’t find it,” Ivy says of the whistle, when Chrys visits her spooky living room lined with shelves of similar artifacts. “It found you.”
It’s all dead ominous, as they might put it in the UK (shot in Ontario with an international cast, the film is technically an Irish-Canadian co-production, but appears to be set in an industrial town in the US – a far cry from Talk To Me’s specificity).
Not that this is the first setback in the life of poor Chrys, a scowling waif styled to resemble Beetlejuice-era Winona Ryder. An orphan with drug addiction in her past, she’s the new girl in town and at school, but by her own admission has little interest in making friends beyond her laidback cousin Rei (Sky Yang). Still, her new classmate Ellie (Sophie Nelisse) does capture her attention – especially once she’s sussed out that Ellie isn’t straight.
For their part, Hardy and Egerton are keen to ensure that the sexual orientation of their characters is never a major dramatic issue in itself. That said, the centring of a lesbian relationship is the most interesting element here by a wide margin: the need to ensure the film doesn’t wind up as a cautionary tale calls for some rewriting of the rules of the slasher genre, which has traditionally presented sex and death as inseparable.
Fear of sex, queer or otherwise, does still visibly underlie the ultra-violent set-pieces in which characters are assaulted by their own future selves – and even the image of blowing on the whistle is quite symbolically charged.
But nothing is ever really allowed to get out of hand: Whistle remains a wilfully routine horror movie, self-aware to the point of caution. The fact that Hardy and Egerton borrow openly from their predecessors isn’t a problem as such. But unlike the Philippou brothers, they’re not bold enough to add anything to the mix that’s entirely their own.
