Whistle: Death Comes Early to Those Who Blow
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B
Cursed objects are having a moment. Horror, like fashion, cycles through its trends, and right now we’re firmly in the era of “Don’t touch that, you idiot!”
We’ve had a severed, tattooed hand in Talk to Me, a cymbal-clapping death monkey in the underrated Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, and a cursed dagger in All Fun and Games. The genre has become a garage sale of supernatural gimmicks with built-in death warrants.
Whistle is the latest addition to the shelf. The title object is an ancient, toad-looking whistle that, when blown, summons death for anyone within earshot. The twist? Death doesn’t just kill you; it kills you the way you were destined to die had you been given the courtesy of a full lifespan.
It’s a clever hook, and the film milks it for some genuinely inventive, well-executed set pieces. As a delivery system for imaginative deaths, Whistle does its job with a certain professional pride.
The trouble is everything that happens between those deaths.
Structurally, this is a wait-your-turn teen horror: who goes next, and how messy will it be? There’s nothing wrong with that. Final Destination built a whole franchise on that premise and, at its best, made it feel like a cruelly funny cosmic game of Mousetrap.
Whistle wants some of that energy, but it also seems to want gravitas. It gestures toward being about fate, addiction, grief, and doomed lives—but never quite earns the emotional weight it’s reaching for. This is not Hereditary, and it’s not trying to be. But it also isn’t content to just be a good, dumb engine for inventive carnage.
The central conceit creates a curious philosophical hiccup the film never fully wrestles with: if these kids were all destined to die young and horribly anyway, what exactly is the curse adding? There’s an unintended bleakness here, the suggestion that the supernatural intervention is almost redundant. Being cursed feels secondary to the fact that these teenagers already seem marked by lives circling the drain. The body count is high; the sense of tragedy, oddly muted.
One of the film’s strongest sequences comes early, during a high-school basketball game. A star player nicknamed Horse (a nickname that raises a suggestion that the movie has no interest in answering) becomes distracted by something only he can see. What follows is vivid, shocking, and satisfyingly disorienting. It’s a terrific cold open—one that promises a mythology the film never quite deepens.
We then jump ahead several years to Chrys (Dafne Keen), a sullen, goth-adjacent recovering addict carrying the stigma of her father’s death. She’s living with her relentlessly upbeat cousin Rel (Sky Yang), whose golden-retriever energy provides the film’s most consistent source of warmth.
Rel is, by a comfortable margin, the most likable person in the room—a quality that in a horror film generally reads as a death sentence. Around them orbit the usual assortment of genre-ready teens, along with a brief cameo from the very adult Nick Frost as a scheming high school teacher—don’t grow too fond of him.
There’s also a romantic subplot between Chrys and Elles (Marie-Sophie Nélisse), tenderly played and refreshingly unexploited, and a parallel thread about Chrys’ struggle with addiction. Both are decent ideas that feel more like seasoning than substance. The film wants these emotional beats to give the carnage meaning, but they mostly register as polite interruptions before the next elaborate demise.
The most tantalizingly underused character is Noah Haggerty (Percy Hynes White), a violent youth pastor who supports drug use while embodying a kind of evangelical sadism. It’s a fantastic, deeply creepy concept—one of the better setups for a horror antagonist in recent memory, evoking shades of Robert Mitchum’s unhinged preacher in Night of the Hunter. The film, however, doesn’t have the nerve or the interest to really explore him. He’s a great idea left smoking in the pulpit.
In the end, Whistle is a perfectly serviceable piece of genre machinery. It’s fun. The deaths are creative. The premise is clever enough to sustain a feature. It just doesn’t have much to say once the blood dries. Between the kills, there’s a sense of narrative idling—characters waiting around to discover whose fate is next to be fast-forwarded.
As a cursed-object movie, it fits neatly into the current trend cycle. As a horror film with something deeper on its mind, it never quite finds the nerve to dig in. Entertaining, occasionally inspired, but ultimately content to stay on the surface—where the bodies pile up, and the ideas have come to die.
Whistle is directed by Corin Hardy and stars Dafne Keen, Marie-Sophie Nélisse, Sky Yang, Percy Hynes White and Nick Frost. Whistle opens February 6, 2026, in select theatres.