Whistle

There’s a wicked little premise at the dark heart of Corin Hardy’s latest horror flick. If you are present to hear the spine-tingling shriek of an Aztec death whistle, death is coming for you – chiefly the way you will inevitably die in the future is accelerated to bring you down in the present. Neat and nifty, right?

Whistle has a ton of fun remixing three decades worth of horror carnage — ‘80s (A Nightmare on Elm Street), ’90s (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer) and early 00’s (Final Destination, The Ring) – but, for the most part, without an ironic wink. It doesn’t all work but it is well-mounted, throwback fun that delivers welcome Halloween hijinks in mid-February.

After an intense prologue, the well-designed whistle, all skull-like eyes, intricate carvings and emblazoned with the motto ‘Summon Your Death’, finds its way into the locker of new high-school student Chrysanthemum (Logan’s Dafne Keen). Relocating to the sleepy steel mill town of Pellington, Dafne is a troubled soul, rumoured to be a former junkie just out of rehab and implicated in the murder of her father. Still, accompanied by her cousin Rel (Sky Yang), she makes fast friends with Grace (Ali Skovbye), Dean (Jhaleil Swaby) and Ellie (Yellowjackets’ Sophie Nélisse) who almost immediately vibes with Chrys. When one of this likeable Gen Z Breakfast Club decides to use the whistle at a late-night revision pool party, the clock starts ticking and the body count starts climbing.

Corin Hardy delivers a pacy 90 minutes of mayhem

Owen Egerton’s screenplay struggles to find elegant ways to deliver exposition, relying on mouthpieces – Nick Frost’s teacher, Michelle Fairley’s doom-mongering grandmother – for cack-handed info dumps. The film also fudges its backstory, confusing Mayan rituals and Guatemalan customs with Aztec mythology. The dialogue never really crackles and the writing plays into the worse kind of fanboy filmmaking, from a pack of Cronenberg cigarettes to a street sign to a ‘Verhoeven steel mill’. We are only missing a Detective G.A. Romero and an Italian pizzeria called Argento’s.

Still, Hardy showed horror bona fides in The Hallow and The Nun and a genuine love for the genre courses through Whistle. His camera moves inscribe the action with dread, the increasingly outlandish kills are staged with imagination (the best of all involves a train), while a set-piece at a harvest festival overflows with ideas and homages. He also gets the other genre at play here – the high-school teen flick – and draws likeable performances to fill out thinly drawn characters.

The result may not change the game but it perfectly understands the rules and delivers a tight, pacy 90 minutes of mayhem. Just put your lips together and blow. Ian Freer

In US theaters Feb 6. Out in UK and Ireland cinemas February 13.