It’s not as if Robert De Niro’s choices have improved all that much since the nadir of the mid-2000s (last year did see him crop up in a Scott Eastwood-led actioner and The Alto Knights) but there’s something specifically rubbishy about his latest that transports us back to that particularly cursed time. The Whisper Man, a film as openly stupid as its title would suggest, could have been released in between the evil clone horror Godsend and imaginary friend thriller Hide and Seek, the kind of bottom-tier project that offers the actor a nice big cheque and the audience a nice little nap.
It’s a familiar pile of B-movie schlock – serial killers, missing children, bumps in the night, more imaginary friends – and there is some initial junky fun to be had as we wonder just where it all might be headed. I was hoping for a destination a little more deranged or vaguely surprising, the film making a silent promise that we’re hurtling toward somewhere wildly unexpected before dumping us in a ditch instead.
It’s based on the British author Alex North’s novel that enough people tore through back in 2019 before it got picked up by Netflix. It’s at least been mercifully adapted into a film rather than a baggy limited series, as is too often the way with plot-heavy airport novels these days, but even stretching thin characters like this across a runtime just under two hours proves to be a struggle. Central is Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott), a crime fiction-writing widower moving back to his home town with young son Jake (which leads to ungainly lines including “you know your mom always wanted us to move back to the town we grew up in”). But he returns just as a child-stealing murderer is on the loose (whoops!), hunted by ambitious, stony-faced detective Amanda (Michelle Monaghan). His methods recall those employed by an infamous, and now imprisoned, serial killer called Frank (Michael Keaton) who was captured by the now-retired detective Pete (De Niro) who also happens to be Tom’s estranged father (“a shitty father but a good fucking detective!”). When Jake goes missing, the three are forced to combine efforts.
I have a nostalgic fondness for the grimy post-Seven attempts to bring infinitely hokier serial killer stories to the big screen, from Kiss the Girls to The Bone Collector, before the Saw franchise replaced mystery and suspense with gristle and innards. But while The Whisper Man overloads on hoariness – a killer who taunts the cops, a spookily underlit house, a gothic nursery rhyme repeated on a loop, a father taking matters into his own hands, a snarling criminal offering clues behind bars, a too-obvious suspect who might as well be called Mr Red Herring – it’s all taken far more seriously than it deserves to be. Any real, transporting throwback appeal is also spoiled by the dreaded Netflix look, flatter and greyer than ever here, that juicy studio gloss of the films it’s trying to recall relegated to the past. It’s a bland director-for-hire gig for the New Zealand director James Ashcroft, a shame after his last film, the reasonably jolting care home-set thriller The Rule of Jenny Pen, a nasty slice of male hagsploitation with two ferocious lead performances.
Like Ashcroft, De Niro is on full checked-out autopilot mode, quietly mumbling perfunctory dialogue while seemingly focused on what he’ll be having for dinner, and Scott feels uncomfortably miscast, his other hard-drinking, fiction-writing genre turn of the year proving to be considerably more effective. An actor traditionally associated with comedy, he often falls into the Steve Carell trap of confusing sitcom histrionics with dramatic hysteria and so his pain and anger at the disappearance of his son never really registers (it would also require some miraculous heavy lifting to sell some of his character’s bafflingly dumb decisions).
The final act is unfortunately short on both surprise and suspense, a reveal only painted as such because of a stupidly unexplored line of investigation earlier in the film. The inevitable overwrought jostling for weapons while characters tumble down stairs and into the basement is too shoddily choreographed to excite while a sudden last scene twist is so inelegantly abrupt that I had to rewind to check I was right. It’s a choice that shovels on some sugar seemingly stolen from the set of an entirely different film, a left turn that’s too sentimental to be the fun kind of silly (I prayed for a twist ending as charmingly dumb-as-rocks as the one in Hide and Seek, De Niro’s other imaginary child B-movie). After a dumpier August than usual, I could have done with some of that fun kind of silly, the kind we used to have that much more of, back when a film like The Whisper Man might have been worth shouting about.
The Whisper Man is now available on Netflix
