WHISTLE (2025)

Studio:   IFC/Shudder
Director: Corin Hardy
Writer:   Owen Egerton
Producer: David Gross
Stars:    Dafne Keen, Sophie Nelisse, Sky Yang, Jhaleil Swaby, Ali Skovbye, Percy Hynes White, Michelle Fairley, Nick Frost

Review Score:

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Summary:

An ancient Aztec whistle curses a group of teenagers to be haunted by doppelgangers who kill them according to how they are fated to die in the future.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Despite being distracted by a haunting vision of a charred man, 17-year-old Mason “Horse” Raymore hits the winning shot in a Pellington High School basketball game. Immediately afterward, Mason rushes to his gym locker to smash an Aztec death whistle, but he is still attacked in the shower by the charred man. Mason’s teammates Dean Jackson and Tanner Church are horrified to find Mason gruesomely burned to death.

Recently released from drug rehab following her father’s death, teenager Chrys Willet leaves Chicago to attend Pellington High School while living with her cousin Rel Taylor, who is also a student. With six months having passed since his death, Chrys is assigned Mason’s old locker, which draws an insult about her problematic past from Dean Jackson as he is accompanied by his girlfriend Grace Browning, whom Rel has had a crush on for years. Ellie Gains, a girl Chrys feels an immediate attraction to, sticks up for Chrys. Chrys knees Dean in his genitals. Having witnessed the incident, schoolteacher Mr. Craven issues detention to Chrys, Ellie, Rel, Dean, and Grace.

Chrys finds the Aztec death whistle, now intact again, inside Mason’s hallway locker and brings it to detention. Mr. Craven identifies the object while Grace uses Google to translate its inscription as “summon the dead.” Because Chrys found it in a locker, Mr. Craven confiscates the whistle as school property.

After dismissing the five students from detention with an assignment, Mr. Craven blows the whistle while alone. A short time later, a haunting doppelganger attacks Mr. Craven, causing his hair to fall out before dropping dead.

Having forgotten a comic book he left behind, Rel returns to the classroom and pockets the whistle. Left alone outside in the parking lot, Chrys meets Noah Haggerty, a youth pastor who is also an unscrupulous drug dealer. Due to his cousin’s history with drug abuse, Rel returns to angrily break up their interaction. Noah bloodies Rel’s nose, pulls a knife, and threatens Rel before leaving.

Chrys, Ellie, Rel, Dean, and Grace gather at Grace’s house to work on the assignment Mr. Craven gave them. Rel shows everyone he recovered the whistle. Dean convinces Grace to blow it. The whistle’s sound hurts everyone’s ears.

Chrys leaves with Ellie following after her. With their attraction mutual, Ellie invites Chrys to the town’s annual harvest festival happening the next day. Distracted by a haunting vision outside her window later that night, Chrys accidentally sends a flattering text that Ellie reciprocates.

Chrys and Rel arrive at school the next day to learn Mr. Craven unexpectedly died from advanced lung cancer. During Principal Flynn’s assembly about Mr. Craven’s death, Ellie sees a strange vision of her doppelganger twisting its head to taunt her.

Chrys and Ellie decide to return the whistle to Mason’s family. The girls meet Mason’s terminally ill grandmother Ivy Raymore, who collected cultural artifacts including the whistle, which she got from a back-alley market in Guatemala. Having already killed Mason and his mother Esme, Ivy warns that the whistle will take more lives since it is stolen treasure from a plundered people. She also reveals that the whistle’s inscription actually reads “summon your dead,” because it will accelerate whatever death you are fated to receive in the future. Ivy insists that Chrys keep the whistle.

Anxious for more information, Ellie suggests looking through records at the hospital where she works because she was always suspicious that Mason’s burning death occurred in a shower and was attributed to a gas leak that didn’t affect anyone else. From his medical file, Chrys and Ellie discover Mason had the physiology of a man in his forties when he died.

Rel, Dean, and Grace attend the seasonal harvest festival in Halloween costumes. Rel sees Grace acquiring weed from Noah. Acknowledging his longtime crush, Grace lets down Rel gently with a platonic kiss on his cheek.

Anxious to warn the others about what they learned, Chrys and Ellie arrive at the festival only to have an uncomfortable encounter with Noah. Ellie kicks Noah, causing him to drop his switchblade. Chrys recovers the knife and slashes Noah’s nostril before she and Ellie flee into the festival.

Grace and Dean become separated while exploring a haunt maze. Grace ends up chased by her doppelganger, a shriveled hag, who catches up and causes Grace to wither and die from old age.

Chrys, Ellie, Rel, and Dean regroup together. Chrys and Ellie reveal what they learned about the curse that now afflicts them all. Dean refuses to believe the old woman found dead was Grace. Rel blames Dean for daring Grace to blow the whistle in the first place. Their subsequent confrontation causes Rel and Dean to go off in separate directions.

Back at Rel’s house, Chrys tells Ellie about how she overdosed, and how she blames herself for her father’s death because he was taking her to the hospital when they were struck by a truck that killed him. Ellie reassures Chrys with a kiss that leads to the two of them continuing to form a romantic connection.

With Rel starting to see visions of him suffering a gruesome death in machinery at the steel mill where he works, Chrys and Ellie return to Ivy Raymore to ask how to stop the whistle’s curse. Ivy tells them the only way to stop it is to give someone else your fated death by marking them with your blood as a sacrifice, allowing yourself to be spared. Chrys sees a vision of her doppelganger dripping wet with a needle in her arm, leading her to believe she will die from a heroin overdose.

Ellie reasons it would be wrong to murder someone else by transferring the curse. Inspired by an idea to have Noah take his place, Rel quickly drives off by himself.

Still mourning Grace’s death, Dean is haunted in his home by a vision of his mangled body. Dean suddenly levitates and is violently contorted to death from a phantom car crash.

Rel kidnaps Noah at gunpoint and brings him to the steel mill. With Noah restrained to a chair, Rel slices his hand in preparation of marking Noah with his blood. Chrys and Ellie arrive in time to convince Rel to not go through with his plan. Rel mutters, “everyone has to die once,” which gives Chrys an idea about how to stop the curse. An invisible force then brutally grinds up Rel’s body as if he was horribly mutilated by metal machinery.

Taking the whistle, Chrys explains to Ellie that just because they have to die, that doesn’t mean they have to stay dead. Together, the two of them plot to use Ellie’s diabetes insulin, an ice bath, and a defibrillator to induce cardiac arrest and then revive each other.

Wanting to ensure Chrys survives, Ellie surprises Chrys by suddenly stabbing an insulin needle in her arm and dunking her in the ice bath, mirroring the image of the doppelganger Chrys saw earlier. While unconscious and underwater, Chrys wrestles with a terrifying vision of her dead double.

Having escaped his restraints, Noah fires Rel’s gun at Ellie, hitting her side and interrupting her attempt to resuscitate Chrys. Fighting against visions of her own doppelganger, Ellie eventually revives Chrys, but she falls to the ground convulsing from diabetic shock.

Unexpectedly, Noah dips his fascinated fingers into Ellie’s blood on the floor, causing the curse to come to him. A frightening experience with his disfigured doppelganger causes Noah’s death, seemingly freeing Chrys and Ellie from the curse.

Three months later, Chrys and Ellie continue their romantic relationship at school, even though Chrys still sees visions of a haunting figure. Meanwhile, freshman student Asha Nelson finds the Aztec death whistle in her new locker. With the girl scheduled to publicly play her violin at a school assembly later, Chrys and Ellie are horrified to see Asha pull out the whistle and blow it in front of a packed auditorium.

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Review:

It would be silly to make an overblown statement by saying “Whistle” is the most formulaic fright film about a cursed object in horror history. Instead, since the movie premiered at Fantastic Fest in 2025 before releasing wide in 2026, it would be less hyperbolic to simply say “Whistle” is the most cliché-riddled thriller of those two years at a minimum.

Whether they’re horsing around with a Ouija board, tempting an urban legend by performing a specific set of steps in a graveyard, or in this case, unwisely fiddling about with an ancient artifact, cyclical curses usually involve teenagers. “Whistle” is no exception. So, after an obligatory opening featuring, what else, a prologue shock to whet horror-hungry appetites that won’t taste another morsel until after a blitzkrieg of excessive exposition, it’s time to meet Chrys, a goth-ish girl whose frowning face and montage of solemn staring suggests she’s seeing a fresh start in a new location following a problematic past.

Fellow high-school student Rel soon bursts into Chrys’s bedroom to begin revealing her bio with dialogue only a writer unable to deliver details in an organic way could dream up. “Good to see you settle in cuz,” Rel says. He adds that he’s in shape “ever since (he) started work at the steel mill.” The guy’s been onscreen for less than 30 seconds and he’s already identified what his job is, that he and Chrys are living together, and what their familial relationship is.

In case anyone forgets that last one, Rel provides an immediate reminder in the very next scene by saying, “I know you’re my cousin and everything…” The responsibility for building Chrys’s background doesn’t fall entirely on Rel. She’s quickly confronted at school by Dean, a basketball player upset over Chrys inheriting the locker that belonged to his friend Mason, who died in the opening. Dean fills in another blank with the insult, “I heard she just got out of junkie rehab after she killed her dad.”

It’s only natural to wonder if any of these characters are capable of speaking normally, without spitting out forced facts. Plenty of predictability gets put on the table through visuals too, like when Chrys’s new crush Ellie conspicuously clutches Chekhov’s insulin bag. Gee, will Ellie’s diabetes play a key part in whatever happens down the line?

Before getting killed, Dean’s buddy Mason smashed an ominous-looking Aztec death whistle into itty-bitty pieces. Unfortunately for him, that didn’t stop a vision of a charred figure from horribly burning the boy to death. Being broken wasn’t the end of the whistle either. Like every other cursed doll, item, or antique someone tries to get rid of by dumping it in the trash, in a disposal, or the way Mason did, the whistle inexplicably reforms and magically transfers to a completely different location than the one where Mason left it.

After Chrys finds the compelling little trinket in her hallway locker, she, Ellie, Rel, Dean, and Dean’s girlfriend Grace, whom Rel conveniently has an unrequited crush on so he can have one more moment cementing him as a sympathetic good guy, come together after an altercation earns everyone detention. That detention is given to them by their teacher Mr. Craven, a name immediately taking viewers out of any immersion for being such an obvious homage. All horror fans admire Wes. There’s no additional cred to be gained here. Nor is there any to be acquired from blatant close-ups on a pack of Cronenberg’s cigarettes or a box of Muschietti cigars.

Curiously, “Whistle” also introduces a couple of inconsequential side characters. Grace has a little brother seen once, seemingly included only so Grace can briefly question if the boy is playing a prank when things get weird in their home. Dean also pals around with basketball teammate Tanner once or twice. Tanner may be a figment of Dean’s imagination, as he’s present when the other five receive detention, yet instantly disappears only to pointlessly reappear for their small town’s lavishly produced Halloween festival, then promptly vanish once again.

There is one more person to put on the plate. Noah, a sketchy youth pastor, deals drugs to kids on the side, which doesn’t sit well with Rel since cousin Chrys has addiction issues. Rel and Noah get into a physical struggle early on, inspiring Rel to prognosticate, “One day he’s gonna get what’s his.” Might that day be soon, since Noah is positioned as a clear-cut villain who only stops smoking to threaten Rel with a switchblade like someone whose death would be welcomed?

Once frightening doppelgangers start haunting everyone who heard the Aztec instrument’s sound, “Whistle” hires an “Old Lady Exposition” to drop in lore concerning the curse. Chrys and Ellie don’t have to visit her in an asylum, but Mason’s antiquity-collecting grandmother Ivy has all the information necessary to explain how hearing the whistle accelerates a death that would have come in the future to come now instead. Naturally, Ivy neglects to mention how to stop the curse, even though she has that information too, requiring Chrys and Ellie to visit a second time so everything isn’t given away all at once. In between, the duo does their own research in the form of flipping through files in a hospital records room, something that’s supposed to be suspenseful because they might get caught by a doctor. Oh no.

Independently, it would be a spoiler to reveal that the teens figure out how to circumvent the curse’s conditions by triggering clinical death and then resuscitating each other. Except that’s literally the same solution in every other movie where someone must stop a death curse. Of course, it never really works, because Death won’t be cheated, and filmmakers couldn’t leave the door open with a suggestive mid-credits stinger to set up sequels only they would be interested in.

“Whistle” boasts a couple of bloody, bone-crunching death scenes that test the limits of what an R-rating will allow as far as gruesomeness goes, but the surrounding story doesn’t have an ounce of originality on its bony body. As before, it would be a heap of hyperbole to say “Whistle” seems like it was drafted by first-generation AI when the stale screenplay clearly credits a human being. At the same time, it’s impossible to find a human element hiding among the movie’s mess of trope-y teens who race from enemies to friends, forge romantic relationships, and navigate supernatural slaughter without using more than a minute of their 48 hours together to process the incredible trauma they continually witness.

NOTE: There is a mid-credits scene.

Review Score: 35

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