Whistle (2025)

New kid at school Chrys (Dafne Keen) finds an ancient Mesoamerican whistle in her school locker. Soon, someone makes the mistake of blowing it, cursing all the teens present, who are now being haunted and killed by their future deaths in various more or less imaginative ways. Hooray for them, I suppose.

Despite a theoretically decent enough cast of young actors and in Corin Hardy a director who knows his way around around a mid-budget horror set piece (his The Nun being one of the few Conjuringverse movies I genuinely appreciate), this tale of teens cursed by a Mayan whistle (the Internet talks about an Aztec death whistle, but the film quite explicitly says Mayan – it’s nonsense in both regards anyhow) is as dire as everyone says it is.

Owen Egerton’s script is a total mess, lacking consistency and even the kind of out-there logic you can easily get away with in supernatural horror, and instead features wonky characterisation and character motivation, as well as a completely messy time line. And not in the classic Italian way of weirdness I delight in, but in the “we don’t actually give a crap, it’s just a horror movie anyhow” kind of way I particularly do not. Nothing here makes sense – hell, even the inscription on the whistle is in our Latin alphabet (and wouldn’t be something you could translate via an Internet translator, come to that), and what’s worse, nothing in the film carries any weight of mood or thematic connection.

What’s left are bits and pieces cobbled together from various teen horrors, and signifiers of It Follows, Final Destination and Smile that not only make the dangerous mistake of reminding me of much better movies but also make it clear that nobody involved in the production actually understood what they were trying to imitate.

But to finish on the only positive note I can come up with about this mess: I did genuinely appreciate how simply normal the film treats the fact its heroic lead romance is a Lesbian one.