Heed the Call of Hardy’s Whistle

3 ½ stars

Don’t let the silly title stop you. This glossy gore fest from director Corin Hardy (The Nun) takes the familiar genre tropes of high schoolers being stalked by malevolent monsters and twists them just enough to be intriguing, original, and enormously entertaining.​

In Whistle, a group of high school students comes in contact with an Aztec Death Whistle – a much better title – with the unusual power to summon their future deaths to come get them ahead of time. For example, let’s say you are a star basketball player destined some time in the future to be killed in a horrible auto accident. If you hear the Aztec Death Whistle when it gets blown – you don’t have to actually blow it, just hear the horrible noise it makes – then the corpse of your future demise will track you down and gruesomely take over your living body. It sounds a bit clunky written down like that, but you’ll get the idea when the star basketball player (Jhaleil Swaby) literally comes apart on the screen.

Hardy and screenwriter Owen Egerton (Blood Fest) do an excellent job of doling out the clues for the high schoolers (and the audience) to solve the mystery of the Aztec Death Whistle. They open with a big kill, move on to some character introduction, hit us with a big kill, then some more character and just a hint of what’s going on, and so on. The kills are all unique and, thanks to Hardy’s visual style and cinematographer Björn Charpentier’s work, beautiful (cinematically speaking). Genre fans will appreciate their efforts to make gore gorgeous; others may be less impressed.

​The cast of Whistle does a decent job making their limited characterizations believable: Swaby the jock, Sky Yang the nerd, and Ali Skovbye the cheerleader. There’s a nice twist having Sophie Nélisse play the goody-two-shoes, mainly because of the same sex twist of having her fall in love with the heroine of the film. It’s that heroine, Chrys, played by Dafne Keen, that really helps raise Whistle above the genre. Chrys is a recovering addict, a tightly wound mix of anger and vulnerability, and the way Keen wears both emotions on her sleeve (and in her heart) is impressive. Keen, best known for playing the mutant Laura in Logan, Deadpool & Wolverine, also gives Chrys a subtle action-hero flair to the film, not in terms of kicking ass but in the way she becomes the natural leader of the group as they solve the mystery and make a stand.

This time of year can be a dumping ground for movies, with studios releasing whatever’s left on their shelves as they focus on getting their more artsy/fartsy films on the radar of the dozens of award organizations and critic groups that give out their movie statues and blessings. A horror film called Whistle fits that profile, which is a shame because it is so much better than that title suggests. Here’s hoping it finds the audience it deserves and, if the jaw-dropping post-credits scene is any indication, the sequel fans are entitled to.