written by: Owen Egerton
produced by: David Gross, Whitney Brown, Macdara Kelleher & John Keville
directed by: Corin Hardy
rated: R (for strong violent content, gore, drug content, and language)
runtime: 100 min.
U.S. release date: February 6, 2026

We’ve all heard the line “Death comes for us all” before, as it appears in countless movies and plays. It’s a challenge to track down who first said it, but it’s been around forever. It’s even in the Bible: the first twelve verses of the nineteenth chapter of Ecclesiastes are titled “Death Comes to All.” A variation of this is repeated in director Corin Hardy’s “Whistle”, which finds a mysterious evil power seeking out high school teens who happen to blow an ancient Mayan death whistle. Screenwriter Owen Egerton (“Blood Fest” and “Mercy Black”) sprinkles lines like,  “Dying is not a choice. It is inevitable. But living is up to you,” and “Death is unstoppable. Once called, it will not relent,” throughout, which could easily be bumperstickers found on hearses.

Hardy scored some financial success with 2018’s “The Nun,” (a branch of “The Conjuring” franchise), and before that, his supernatural horror flick, “The Hallow”, received some notoriety. “Whistle” is his latest, and it primarily succeeds in presenting some gnarly and gory deaths for most of the cast. Beyond that, Egerton’s story is weighed down by predictable beats. While it has a 90s teen horror movie vibe, it’s more like the “Final Destination” movies than the “Scream” movies, in that the antagonist is your future death – meaning: in whatever way you will die, you will meet such a demise earlier than planned.

Our protagonist is Chrys Willett (Dafne Keen), a sullen, withdrawn teenager from Chicago who recently moved to a small steel mill town to live, the lone survivor of a family tragedy. She moves in with her comic book artist cousin, Rel (Sky Yang), who attends Pellington High School, where she will be starting as the requisite “new kid”. On her first day, Chrys is introduced to Rel’s crush, the popular Grace (Ali Skovbye), her jock boyfriend, Dean (Jhaleil Swaby), and Elloe (Sophie Nelisse), as well as the requisite bullies who must’ve received a group text that identifies new arrivals. It’s doubtful the school administration received the same notifications, because they didn’t bother to clean out Chrys’s assigned locker in anticipation of her arrival.

But, if they did do their job, then how would these characters stumble upon the movie’s evil McGuffin? Amid a bunch of junk in her locker, Chrys finds a bizarre object that looks like an ancient artifact. The locker belongings used to belong to an all-star basketball player named Mason “Horse” Raymore (Stephen Kalyn), who died tragically at school. Some quick online searches and an examination by her teacher, Mr. Craven (Nick Frost), Chrys and her new cohorts soon learn that the object is a Mayan death whistle. One blow and anyone within earshot of the piercing whistle will soon find themselves succumbing to an evil curse that turns them into the age they’re originally meant to die. So, whether they will be fatally hit by a truck or peacefully die of old age, if they hear that death whistle, then that’s how they’ll die. After a few of their friends die in this manner, Chrys and Ellie become determined to find a way to prevent their premature deaths.

The movie has a good opening that establishes the horror and the types of kills we can expect, yet looking back on it definitely conjures some questions. This is where we see Mason’s death, whom we are introduced to during a pivotal basketball game at Pellington. He’s trying to keep his head in the game, but he sees a strange vision that he can’t escape. Disoriented and anxious, he destroys the whistle (at this point, we don’t know what it is just yet), but that doesn’t prevent his future death from reaching him in the locker room shower. It’s an effective enough opener to hold our interest, even though it feels familiar.

After that, Egerton and Hardy start checking off the boxes of the teen horror subgenre. Chrys is introduced as someone with a bit of an attitude and a haunted backstory, and this is when we also learn her full name is Chrysanthemum (no, really). When Chrys kicks a bully in the nuts, a teacher assigns her and everyone around her to detention, which is where the main cast of “teens” will assemble, and relationship dynamics begin, including ongoing and newfound crushes. More importantly, this is where Frost’s Mr. Craven confiscates the whistle. After detention, Craven tests the whistle himself, having checked online to see how valuable the artifact might be. We know a teacher’s salary has its limits, so an online auction sale is no doubt enticing.

Because of the opening scene, we know what’s going to happen to the teacher, and that trope of the audience knowing more than the movie characters is also another box to check off. Soon enough, Craven’s empty classroom is visited by his future self, who’s been ravaged by lung cancer. Once the horrifying figure, a manifestation of death, faces Craven, the teacher starts coughing up some nasty stuff, loses his hair, and shrivels to death. The visual effects are convincing here, and they wind up being the highlight of the movie – that is, if you’re solely here for that kind of thing.

This returns possession of the titular object to the teens, yet only a few believe the theory about the object that Chrys and Ellie are developing. Of course, the whistle gets blown again, this time in the presence of all the teens. This is the point in the movie where death will come for each of them, regardless of their skepticism. This is also around the time I felt this was the type of movie that should’ve been released in October, rather than a week before Valentine’s Day. That position is solidified in the movie’s third act, when the teens visit an outdoor harvest festival with an elaborate maze that you can bet one of them will meet their gruesome future death.

There’s a supporting character in “Whistle” that serves as an additional antagonist, one that is human and decidedly not an artifact you blow into. That character is Noah (Percy Hynes White), who is probably a little older than the teens and serves as the preacher at a local church, albeit one who seems to have stepped out of a Dean Koontz novel. While Egerton doesn’t provide the character with any multitudes, what we do learn of him is strange. The first red flag is that he in no way acts like Jesus, and the second is that he also happens to be the local drug dealer. Apparently, a preacher’s salary has its limits as well.

As the story unfolds, Chrys and Ellie develop a bond as they go off on their own Scooby-Doo quest in a desperate effort to reverse or prevent the curse from continuing. They visit the hospital where Ellie works to sneak around and look through some files. That connects them to the grandmother of the first victim, Ivy Raymore (Michelle Fairley, a long way from Catelyn Stark), who winds up knowing the most about the death whistle. Her home is filled with ancient relics, and she knows the rules of the whistle, which means the character exists to describe them and offer Chrys and Ellie a possible way out. If she collects all these treasures and knows what to do and what not to do with them, maybe she should’ve been more responsible with who leaves her home with them. Considering the urgency of the story, it seems odd that Chrys and Ellie have time to act on their infatuation with each other. You know, maybe do that after you find a workaround for the whistle, but teens are gonna teen.

The third act winds up being much of what you’d expect, with a steady output of violence that’s unfortunately more gross than it is scary or suspenseful. As for the young ensemble, some have been in television work, but the most widely known actor is Keen, who we were first introduced to in “Logan”, where she played Laura, Hugh Jackman’s tiny yet feral clone. It was impressive how excellent she was in that role at such a young age. She went on to do some television work as well (HBO’s “His Dark Materials” and the Disney Star Wars show “The Acolyte”) and then reprised her role as Laura a couple of years back in “Deadpool & Wolverine.” She’s had a powerful presence in basically everything she’s done, that is, until “Whistle”. In this movie, her first lead feature, there’s not much to her character, and she unfortunately comes across as wooden. To be fair, none of her co-stars really stand out, either.

“Whistle” isn’t out to deliver any deep themes or heavy emotions, but steadily maintains blood and a few freak-outs. That’s it.  The only thing clever about it is the cheeky posters. Beyond that, this winds up being a pretty unoriginal offering. Any horror aficionado paying close attention, or anyone with a familiarity with horror directors, or just familiar with horror directors, will find it easy to catch some Easter Eggs that Cardy plants in an obvious manner. Hint: Mr. Craven is one of them.

RATING: **