Blow My Whistle

Whistle is Corin Hardy's third movie, after his 2015 breakout The Hallow and 2018's Conjuring spin-off The Nun. This new horror flick sits halfway between the indie energy of his maiden effort and the box ticking boredom of his big studio follow-up, with self seriousness butting up against dumb fun.

The set-up is most reminiscent of Final Destination, with added high school slasher vibes. Chrys (Dafne Keen) moves in with her cousin Rel's (Sky Yang) family following the death of her father. Within about ten minutes of attending her high school she becomes besotted with Sophie Nellisse's Ellie, ends up in detention after a confrontation with loudmouth basketball player Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and finds an Aztec death whistle in her new locker. Naturally, the teens end up blowing the death whistle which causes them all to be stalked by their future deaths. This manifests as a ghostly apparition of your dead future self who causes you to suffer said death as soon as they touch you.

This premise has two challenges to overcome. Firstly, in order for the kills to be suitably cinematic, the cast need to have fairly extravagant demises waiting for them in their future. A film of people gently passing in their sleep wouldn't be much fun, so it turns out most of the characters here would have been mangled in young adulthood even if they hadn't crossed paths with the whistle. That's fine here, we could just be dealing with an unlucky bunch, but it makes turning the film into a franchise (which it definitely wants to be) a tricky prospect.

Secondly, it seems such outlandish deaths would draw more attention. The film opens with a high school basketball player burning to death in a shower in front of a locker room full of people and his autopsy reveals a DNA age in the mid-thirties. Logic dismissal is par for the course in many horror movies but the town writing this off as "a little bit strange" is at odds with the more serious tone the movie is going for.

You get the feeling the movie wants to be seen as a contemporary of something like 2022's Talk to Me but without that film's drug addiction allegory it has none of the weight. The centre of the story here is a romance that had potential to be charming but goes from eyeing each other up in the corridor to the most intense, death defying, love of all time in the space of an evening. We also have a group of characters that don't quite sit well together. Teen horror has struggled to find new archetypes since the jocks/nerds/cheerleaders of the 90s went out of date and people here seem to change personality from scene to scene. That said, sinister drug dealing Youth Pastor is a novel addition and we do get a fun cameo from Nick Frost.

What we also get are a couple of fun, and graphic, kills. Somebody being ripped apart by the effects of a car crash while sitting in their bedroom is a particular standout. The premise doesn't allow for the fun or tense set-up of a Final Destination kill, but having the cast stalked by ghostly versions of themselves is a novel touch.

Leaning into these gratuitous kills and silliness more would have made Whistle stand out better. As is, it's a passable, entry level horror but not scary or impactful enough to live in memory much beyond credit rolling time.

6 artefacts that should be left alone out of 10.

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