Whistle (2025)

I love horror B-movies. It’s just a cozy watch to me. And in that cozy watch I often find strong performances, intimate character moments, clever premises and very often a good sense of place in a haunted slice of Americana.

Whistle falls straight into that category. The trailer leans heavy on pedigree. From the director of The Nun, Corin Hardy. From the producer of The Monkey and Longlegs, John Friedberg. From the studio that brought you Late Night with the Devil – the trailer wants you to know exactly what it’s selling.

What struck me most about Whistle is the look and feel. The movie plays like it was written, designed and shot in the late 90s. The cars. The high school lockers. The main character, Chrys Willet, played by Dafne Keen – an ex-addict high school student with a heavy goth look. Even the conversations feel late 90s. Everybody and everything seems to have wandered in from that darker, moodier teen horror cycle that was so popular 30 years ago.

Same goes for the story beats. Early on, a school faculty member dies – no spoilers as to who or how! – and the next morning the kids drive up to a deserted parking lot. Puzzled, they walk into the auditorium wondering what happened and only then learn of the killing. None of this makes sense today. The second something like that happens social posts would go viral and within minutes the news would spread like wildfire across town. Whistle does have cell phones and texting, but it really feels to me like this script – penned by Owen Egerton – has been around for a while and was finally produced after a little updating here and there.

And the characters? The goth girl, Chrys Willet, played by Dafne Keen, is a prime candidate for a final girl – though I will not spoil whether she is or is not! The jock, Dean Jackson, played by Jhaleil Swaby. The shy introverted kid with a crush on the hot cheerleader, Rel Taylor, played by Sky Yang. And the cheerleader herself, Ellie Gains, played by Sophie Nélisse. All of it feels so 90s. We do get a few welcome twists. Chrys Willet – our maybe final girl – is gay, and the film treats that with a total sense of ease. Very much of our own time.

The kills are brutal. Graphic, unforgiving and blessed with intense pacing and impact. Whistle relies heavily on jump scares – and I do mean heavily. It loves to wind up tension, throw in a fake-out, then hit you with a quick cut and a barrage of sound. An old trick horror movies do overuse. But in Whistle it works, mostly thanks to the absolutely top-notch sound design, an aggressive mix that hits you in all the right ways, and a soundtrack by Doomphonic that imbues the gore with a heavy, propulsive force.

Whistle is shot beautifully by Björn Charpentier, who paints a drab yet cozy – a key mix in horror – rust belt town complete with an abandoned steel mill. The gray and brown tones that pervade most frames make the bright red blood pop right out, and to top it off we get a multicolored set-piece at a local harvest/Halloween celebration.

One problem, for me at least: a lot of shots do suffer from a choice that plagues about 90% of digitally shot movies now. So many close-ups and blurry backgrounds. So many. I do not know whether that obsession comes from cinematographers, studios or a general tacit agreement that every frame needs a shallow focus – but to me it’s madness. Is it too much to ask to see a background? And why invest so much in production design and then hide it in a haze of soft-focus blur? It’s one thing when a director like Zack Snyder makes a conscious, deliberate artistic choice and hunts down a set of vintage 1960s Canon Rangefinder lenses to make Army of the Dead feel like a dreamscape. It is another thing entirely when a streaming-dictated world tries to force all movies in the direction of a high-end YouTube video.

And the plot? The premise of Whistle is pure old-school curse horror: a group of high school kids find an artifact – in our case an ancient Aztec whistle – and once they fool around and dare each other to use it, they summon an entity that comes to slaughter them one by one. Everybody scrambles to understand the rules and hopes to stop the curse before they are all dead.

What really helps the movie for me is its sense of place. Production designer Jennifer Spence makes the town of Pellington and its high school feel lived-in. The set-piece at the harvest festival-slash-Halloween party feels like a real town fair. I believed those kids had grown up in that town. And I found a side character memorable: Noah Haggerty, played by Percy Hynes White, a bolo tie-wearing youth pastor who runs a local church, sells drugs to the high school kids on the side and just loves pulling out his switchblade. He is a small character with a pivotal role, and just odd, unsettling and specific enough to stick. He gives the film a little more grime and personality.

Whistle is a straight-up curse movie with high school kids, a deadly artifact, escalating deaths and a race to stop the curse before no one is left standing. It executes all that really well. It has a strong atmosphere, an excellent soundtrack, some seriously nasty kills and a sharp sense of place. A physical media release is on the way: a Blu-ray courtesy of Black Bear Pictures, so far only announced for the UK market. If you are looking for a horror B-movie that gives you that classic setup, delivers on the promise of gore and violence and wraps the proceedings in a convincing late-90s haze, Whistle is your ticket.