A serial killer thriller adapted from a critically acclaimed novel, produced by the Russo Brothers and starring Robert DeNiro, Michael Keaton, Adam Scott, Michelle Monaghan, and Hamish Linklater, at the bare minimum should be an entertaining film.
Sadly, The Whisper Man, Netflix’s adaptation of Alex North’s 2019 New York Times bestselling novel of the same name, is a lifeless film that wastes its immense cast talent by recycling clichés.
The Whisper Man takes place in the fictionalized New Jersey town of Garretton — a town once haunted by the serial killer known as “The Whisper Man.” The killer’s MO was to tap on the bedroom window of children, luring them to the window; he’d whisper to them, convincing them to leave their home with him. He would then record conversations with the children before killing them. Urban legend around the killer has grown throughout generations that there’s a nursery rhyme that every kid in the film seems to know.
30 years after the original killer (Michael Keaton) was caught, children are now turning up dead, and a Garretton detective, Amanda Beck (Michelle Monaghan), feels they have a copycat killer on their hands. She tries to enlist the detective who caught The Whisper Man, Peter Willis (Robert DeNiro), to solve the crime. Once Willis agrees to help Beck, they must consult the original killer to get inside the head of this new version.
Meanwhile, grieving widower Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott) has relocated to his deceased wife’s hometown to start anew with his son. His mother’s death still haunts his son, and the new Whisper Man soon abducts him. Now, Amanda, Peter, and Tom must work together to find Tom’s son before it’s too late.
The sheer number of disappointing aspects of The Whisper Man is staggering.
First and foremost, The Whisper Man himself is not at all scary, interesting, and worst of all … important. We only see the vaunted “tapping on the window” happen once. This is the only real bright spot in the film, as it leads to a genuinely terrifying moment. However, we never see it happen again. In fact, we only see the Whisper Man talk to the kids he’s captured, interviewing them about their families. He quickly gets relegated to a subject of the manhunt led by Monaghan and never builds into a deadly, dangerous threat like Buffalo Bill or Red Dragon.
Those characters are brought up because The Whisper Man cribs way too much from Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon. It tries too hard to make Keaton’s original killer a Hannibal Lecter-esque character that, even with Michael Keaton’s immense talent, comes off as Lecter cosplay rather than something wholly original.
The climax of the film egregiously “takes inspiration” from Silence, as Monaghan’s character has the same “realization” of who the killer is that Clarice Starling had, then engages in a struggle with the killer not dissimilar to Ed Norton’s Will Graham had with The Red Dragon in the film of the same name. The similarities are so blatant that they pull you out of the suspense and action and make you focus on how much this feels like another film.
This scene typifies the film’s issue: it feels like plots and characters grafted together to create a forgettable “Netflix gourmet cheeseburger.” The characters are all caricatures. Keaton’s Whisper Man is Hannibal Lecter cosplay. DeNiro sleepwalks through the grizzled, jaded detective character. Scott is saddled with the predictably unpredictable sad-dad role. Monaghan is given nothing to do as a detective “obsessed” with catching the killer. And poor Hamish Linklater is burdened with the eccentric millionaire character that feels like it belongs in any movie but this one.
While so much of this “inspiration” is flagrantly obvious, it could be forgiven if the film had any urgency. Major plot twists and reveals — which this film is littered with — happen so matter-of-factly that you’re taken out of the film by the lack of importance anything has. Some moments are, in theory, supposed to be big, emotional reveals that… happen. You can tell that these moments likely came off better in the novel since there were likely pages and chapters dedicated to the build-up of the moment, but here they happen in the blink of an eye, and no one cares.
The Whisper Man, despite being the #1 movie on Netflix nearly two weeks after its release, is a movie that you, like the children in the movie, should have done, should avoid at all costs. This isn’t one of those “so bad it’s good” films; this is just a shockingly boring, hollow film not worth your time.
