“Anyone who isn’t dead or from another plane of existence would do well to cover their ears… right about NOW.”

New emo/goth/problemed final-ish girl Chrysanthemum “Chrys” Willet (Dafne Keen) relocates to a new town whose recent high school sports star “Horse” (Stephen Kalyn) met with an inexplicable end, but Chrys has a tragic baggage-filled backstory of her own. She promptly runs into bully Dean Jackson (Jhaleil Swaby), is defended by possible romantic interest Ellie Gains (Sophie Nélisse), and is tempted with drugs by trusted local youth pastor Noah Haggerty (Percy Hynes White) — I did not make this up. Oh, and Chrys finds a stone-like skull-headed whistle nestled inside an ornate urn in Horse’s old locker, gets it confiscated by opportunistic teacher Mr. Craven (Nick Frost), who then (of course) does the dumbest thing imaginable in a horror movie involving a strange and ritualistic-looking artifact.

Working from a script by Owen Egerton, director Corin Hardy (who previously directed The Nun) unleashes a small-town low-concept horror idea that feels awfully familiar. It’s great to see Dafne Keen as the lead in a scary movie, but it’s also hard to imagine she won’t fight like a rabid badger if cornered, not unlike hiring Nic Cage to play a mundane role without expecting a sudden manic turn. Following the recent and highly successful Final Destination: Bloodlines, Whistle looks like it was pulled down from a shelf, dusted off, and given a fresh coat of paint, hoping viewers might mistake it for something else. On the other hand, our MacGuffin is a presumably cursed Aztec death whistle, and how can I be expected to ignore that?

Where every horror film has gone before! Absolutely cribbing from far better fare, Whistle noticeably fumbles the group introduction (unlike Clown In a Cornfield which knocked this out of the farm tract), desperately trying to recover with what little originality it could muster. Unlike the Final Destination franchise offing characters using incidental Rube Goldberg traps, this literal “death whistle” moves up the expiration date on your birth certificate; to quote Ms. Argentina from Beetlejuice: “It’s all very personal.” Unfortunately, the kills are saddled with dime-store CGI… with one notable corn-maze exception (golf clap) that should have informed how all the earlier carnage might have gone. There’s a mildly entertaining mid-credit twist, but the rest of the film refuses to rise above its 1980s rental-tapes-in-a-blender script.

The romance angle here felt fresh but ultimately remains unexplored, and coupled with too many generic character tropes, there’s not enough offered up to care; was there a longer cut of this film? There are a number of clever names strewn throughout the production, homages to horror genre creators and directors, but the concept itself never feels fully explored and too often mirrors better films. Fulfilling the mysterious wise person that inevitably provides a clue is Michelle Fairley, unfortunately saddled with empty exchanges like “What if I don’t want to die?” “Then you shouldn’t have been born!” (insert dull cackle here). Even adding a bit of self-aware humor might have elevated the material, but as is, the theatrical cut falls very flat.

If the unexplored original ideas could have been championed over tired fallbacks, there was some potential here, but the clearest is hoping Tony Todd would suddenly make an appearance (non-spoiler: he doesn’t). Maybe a clever sequel or prequel could backfill the first film and better explore this idea going forward; it absolutely worked when the unremarkable Ouija got shored up by Origin of Evil (in Flanagan we trust). At least the titular whistle (and its handsome carrying case) looked pretty cool… you know, for a premium smoke shop crack pipe.

Whistle is rated R for strong violent content, gore, drug content, language, and is it over yet?

One skull recommendation out of four