‘The Whisper Man’ Deserves this Review

The Whisper Man arrived on Netflix on August 28 with a reported $50 million budget, a star cast and the Russo brothers among its producers. Yes, those two Russo — Avengers — brothers. I imagine a substantial portion of that money went to bringing Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, Michelle Monaghan and Michael Keaton to the project, because the rest of the cast looks as if it was purchased on Temu. Monaghan, too sadly, looks like the Temu version of Michelle Monaghan. Faded, uncharismatic, without soul or life.

Yet, for reasons that surpass logic, science and every known human principle, The Whisper Man has become Netflix’s No. 1 movie in numerous countries, including Spain, where I currently live. This is why I have decided to give it a review full of spoilers, because honestly, that’s all it deserves.

Whether you know the ending, whether I tell you who the killer is, whether I explain every ridiculous plot twist or whether you watch it completely unaware, the experience remains exactly the same. You are going to spend two hours watching something so absurd, implausible, incoherent and fundamentally incomprehensible that knowing what happens in advance cannot possibly make it worse. If anything, knowing what is coming might actually make the experience slightly more bearable.

The Whisper Man ★ (1/5 stars)
Directed by: James Ashcroft
Written by: Ben Jacoby, Chase Palmer; based on the novel by Alex North
Starring: Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, Adam Scott, Michael Keaton
Running time: 114 mins

The movie opens with an astonishingly cheap-looking drone shot over an empty field, where a group of police officers discovers a corpse. Among these searchers is detective Amanda Beck (Monaghan), but identifying her as the star of White Lotus and True Detective is surprisingly difficult because she looks like an actress wearing a police jacket, as if the casting department had simply found someone who vaguely fit the description. The whole sequence appears to be an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of True Detective Season One, except with the production value of a student film, and from there we meet Tom Kennedy (Scott), a widowed crime writer who moves with his young son Jake into the house where Tom’s late wife grew up.

Jake is traumatized by his mother’s death and has trouble going down the stairs because, as we later understand, he witnessed something terrible involving her and stairs. So naturally, Tom decides that this is the perfect house in which to raise his traumatized child. Jake also begins seeing the ghost of his dead mother.

The central mystery concerns a serial child murderer known as the Whisper Man, whose modus operandi is to stand outside children’s homes and whisper to them through the windows before abducting them. Except that he does not really whisper. He speaks in a deep, guttural voice that sounds suspiciously like Batman, which means that throughout the movie I kept waiting for Keaton, who plays the original Whisper Man, Frank Carter, to don his batcape and somehow rescue everyone from this disaster. He never does. Carter, of course, is already in prison, having been captured years earlier by retired detective Pete Willis (De Niro), while the new disappearances suggest that someone has revived the old killer’s methods.

Detective Beck therefore seeks out Willis for help but, in the typical cheap-thriller version of the hero’s journey, the retired detective initially refuses because apparently every movie of this kind requires an emotionally damaged man who must first be persuaded to return to the case. De Niro, meanwhile, looks so physically diminished and emotionally absent that I wanted to offer him some soup and suggest that perhaps we should take him somewhere quiet and comfortable. And because the screenplay apparently believes that revelations are the same thing as character development, we eventually discover that Willis is also Tom Kennedy’s estranged father, despite the fact that the two men have different surnames, which is apparently just one more mystery the movie expects us to simply accept.

Meanwhile, Jake sees a mysterious hand wearing a blue glove reaching through the mail slot and trying to grab him, except that Tom sees it too. So, this is not a case of the child imagining things or seeing some supernatural figure that adults cannot perceive; the father literally witnesses a strange gloved hand reaching through the door toward his son. And what does Tom do? He does not call the police, he does not leave the house, he does not barricade the doors or even appear particularly interested in determining who is trying to grab his child. He simply sends Jake to his room. Later, Tom discovers a man hiding in the basement, the man escapes, Tom chases him, falls down and watches the villain run away. At this point any rational human being might reasonably consider moving somewhere else for his own and his son’s safety. Not Tom. He stays in the house, because apparently the possibility of having his traumatized son abducted by a serial killer is not quite enough of a reason to change his address.

Eventually, of course, the new Whisper Man does kidnap Jake, and the movie transforms into a bargain-basement version of The Silence of the Lambs. Willis visits Carter in prison to seek information, turning Keaton into a kind of Hannibal Lecter without the cannibalism. Keaton, to his credit, seems to understand exactly what kind of movie he is in. His performance has the peculiar quality of a man who knows he has already been paid and has decided to enjoy himself anyway. Everyone else, meanwhile, appears to have been instructed simply to recite their lines. Nobody acts. They say words. There is no dramatic weight, no emotional texture, no sense that anyone involved is actually inhabiting a character, while New Zealander James Ashcroft’s direction is flat as a pancake and the editing sometimes looks as if the entire movie was cut quickly on a smartphone.

The film is based on Alex North’s novel. I have no idea how good the novel might be, but whatever happened between the source material and what eventually appeared on Netflix resulted in a movie in which the investigation itself becomes almost irrelevant because there is simply no reason for us to care about what is happening. Tom is obviously devastated by his son’s kidnapping and responds by drinking heavily, while Carter agrees to help only if his estranged family is brought to the prison so he can see his son, whom he has not seen in years. Again, we are apparently supposed to understand the emotional significance of all this, but the movie has done such a poor job establishing any emotional connection that the whole thing feels like people completing administrative tasks while pretending they are participating in a thriller.

For the denouement we discover, to no one’s surprise, the identity of the new Whisper Man, and the movie finally brings everyone together for the inevitable confrontation. Whisper Man II attacks Beck, repeatedly stabs Willis and is eventually captured after Jake is rescued. There is also a suspicious character who collects objects connected to serial killers, a subplot that seems to exist primarily because someone decided the movie needed one more suspicious person, as well as another police officer whose main function appears to be proving that Beck is not the only police officer employed in the entire town.

And then, when you think the suffering is finally over, the filmmakers find one last way to make the entire experience even more incoherent. Carter has spent all this time wanting to see his estranged son, who is now also in prison, and somehow a guard simply opens the cell door and allows them to meet. What happens next is one of those moments when you can almost hear the director and producers asking themselves how much further they can push an already broken story: Michael Keaton strangles his own son, and the movie ends.

This is perhaps what streaming cinema increasingly looks like: enormous amounts of money spent manufacturing two-hour capsules of attention, packaged around recognizable faces and algorithm-friendly premises. Netflix does not necessarily need these movies to be good; it needs people to click, and people click. Put De Niro, Monaghan, Scott and Keaton on a poster, let the algorithm push it into millions of homes, and sooner or later somebody is going to press play. For Netflix, the machine works. For the producers and actors, the checks clear. Somewhere in the process, however, the idea that a movie should actually be good becomes almost irrelevant.

Maybe this is the future: vast, expensive bags of cinematic hot air, produced to be consumed by an audience already trained to scroll, click and move on without paying much attention to the details, with the occasional genuine little gem appearing somewhere in the catalog to remind us that streaming platforms are still capable of making something worth watching. The Whisper Man is not that gem. It will remain in my memory for one reason only: I wrote this review. And frankly, that is more than the movie deserves.