There’s an exciting immediacy to the way Whistle opens. It blasts the doors right off the hinges, opening on a high school basketball game that offers horror in glaring stadium lights and sweaty chaos as opposed to shadowy hallways or fog-drenched forests. It’s a kinetic start that immediately promises something visceral and alive. For a decent chunk of its runtime, Whistle really hums with that promise.
That’s because the film looks consistently strong and feels convincingly alive in its textures. Director Corin Hardy, best known for 2018’s The Nun, along with cinematographer Björn Charpentier (Beirut), bring a striking visual eye to this high school horror flick. A mid-movie carnival sequence in particular gives the narrative a jolting, surreal edge, and there’s an unmistakable ambition in the production design - even if the story around it often trips over its own feet.
The premise is simple. A group of high schoolers stumble on an ancient Aztec death whistle, and the act of blowing it summons their future deaths to them. Think of it this way: If you were meant to die of old age, you’d begin rapidly aging. If you were meant to die in a fire, you’d begin burning up. The idea is genuinely intriguing: a cursed object that doesn’t just kill you, but does so in the shape of what your end was destined to be. It’s a strong enough conceptual hook, and you can see why Hardy was drawn to it. He’s talked about wanting to make a traditional high school horror movie in the vein of A Nightmare on Elm Street, and to its credit, there's just enough narrative thread in Whistle to go for that golden age feeling.
But the film’s script, penned by Owen Egerton (Blood Fest, Mercy Black), never quite finds firm footing in its own characters or mythology. Rules about how the whistle works morph as the plot demands them. Sometimes death creeps around and takes its sweet time, other times it strikes instantly. When you introduce an idea as specific as this, you owe the audience a consistent logic, and Whistle doesn’t manage to deliver one. What should be eerie, haunting dread or unexpected shock dissolves into a by-the-numbers checklist of slowly peering around corners until the jump scare comes.
Perhaps the biggest casualty of the weak scripting is the cast’s potential. Dafne Keen (Logan, Deadpool & Wolverine) stars as Chrys, who has just started fresh at a new school and is already shadowed by the knowledge that her time is limited. She should be a decently riveting protagonist. Her dynamic with her cousin Rel (Last Days and Rebel Moon star Sky Yang), equal parts irritation and affection, is one of the more authentic threads, and you buy that relationship even when the plot around it buckles. In addition, the slow-burn attraction between Chrys and her classmate Ellie (Heated Rivalry’s Sophie Nélisse) feels real enough to give the movie some emotional ballast.
But then you’ve got Grace (Ali Skovbye) and Dean (Jhaleil Swaby), the archetypal high school bullies straight off the boomer cliché conveyor belt. There’s also Mr. Craven (Nick Frost), the kind of petty asshole teacher who hands out detention like a tyrant. And while genre veteran Frost does his best to wring something interesting out of Craven’s exposition - including being the first one to blow into the titular cursed object - the dialogue surrounding him is so clunky that even decent performances feel held underwater.
The narrative structure leans heavily on horror norms to carry it, and it doesn’t always work in the film’s favor. Uninspired scare setups, predictable jump cues, and a third act that feels like it borrowed ideas from three or four better movies blunt any real tension. It’s the kind of climax that aims for mythic terror but lands somewhere between confused homage and messy pastiche.
All that said, Whistle does have its moments. There’s enough oddball energy - largely from Ral and Noah the youth pastor (Wednesday’s Percy Hynes White) who also happens to dabble in less-than-saintly vices - that the movie occasionally jolts you out of horror fatigue with a genuinely inspired chuckle. And once again, visually, it’s often gorgeous. Production design throughout the carnival, the claustrophobic school interiors, and the bleak outskirts of town are shot with an eye for mood that the script never quite matches.
That’s where Whistle feels like a lesson in wasted potential. The concept of an ancient cursed object meeting teenage malaise has real promise. The look and feel of the movie betray an ambition that could’ve been something. By the time the credits roll, you’re left with a horror film that almost clicked. It ends up as just tantalizing glimpses of creativity buried under uninspired execution.
In the end, Whistle feels like a strong visual idea asking the wrong questions. It could’ve been an all-time great horror starter for a new generation, but instead it’s just adequate: a few solid ideas, some decent scares, and an aesthetic worth admiring - all hampered by a script that never quite pulls its demons together.
‘Whistle’ blows into theaters February 6th, 2026.
