Whistle (2026)
A New Twist on a Familiar Formula
This post contains affiliate links. If you click on a link and make a purchase, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Whistle, which recently landed on Shudder, is obviously inspired by Final Destination. It’s one of a number of similar films to come out in recent years.
I haven’t enjoyed most of these copycats. For example, I gave a negative review to Tarot (2024). However, Whistle beats the odds with compelling performances, a unique twist, and wildly creative death scenes.
Chrys (Dafne Keen) has just started at a new high school. She inherits the locker of a student who succumbed to a fiery death in a bizarre incident.
The transfer student finds a mysterious whistle inside her new locker. It is confiscated by a nasty, chain-smoking teacher who sends Chrys to detention for no particular reason. The next morning, he’s found dead from lung cancer despite not showing any symptoms the day before.
Turns out that people who blow on the whistle die in the way that they are eventually fated to check out, except that their deaths happen now instead of potentially years or decades into the future. Even worse, the same fate can befall anyone who hears the whistle being blown. All hell breaks loose after someone blows the whistle at a party.
Chrys quickly becomes infatuated with her pretty new classmate, Ellie (Sophie Nellis). Ellie, Chrys, Chrys’s cousin Rel (Sky Yang), and their friends are in a race against time to keep themselves alive. They eventually find a potential solution similar to what works (sometimes) in the Final Destination movies. Of course, most of them die spectacularly in the process. There’s plenty of gore to keep slasher fans satisfied.
The concept of having characters suffer a sped-up version of how they were eventually going to die is a fresh twist. The deaths are mainly connected to the victims’ personality or lifestyle instead of the more random demises in other similar movies.
Unfortunately this movie’s mythology is thin. Michelle Fairley pops up briefly to play a Tony Todd-style role. Her characters’ sole purpose is to explain to the teens what’s going on. This part of the script should have been fleshed out more. It seems like director Corin Hardy was worried about slowing down the film with exposition.
Keen and Nelisse carry this movie. They both give genuine performances and their onscreen chemistry is believable. I hadn’t seen Keen since her acclaimed child performance in Logan. She deserves to be better known. I’ve never seen Sophie Nelisse (Yellowjackets) give a bad performance and this is no exception.
Whistle has a nice mix of likeable and unlikeable characters. You’ll cheer at some of the demises but root for other characters to survive. That’s a great quality for any slasher to have.
How about a gay final girl? LGBT characters are increasingly common in horror films, but they are rarely featured in the lead role(s). Chrys and Ellie join Deena and Sam from the Fear Street trilogy as among the few major examples. There’s also Jade Daniels, the queer final girl from Stephan Graham Jones’s Indian Lake novel trilogy.
Whistle is capped with one of those inevitable set up for a sequel endings. Unlike many of the movies that do this, I would actually be interested in seeing a continuation. That would give the filmmakers a chance to add to the mythology and give the story more depth.
Rating
Although not as good as the best of the Final Destination installments that clearly inspired it, Whistle is a fun bloody slasher bolstered by strong performances from Dafne Keen and Sophie Nelisse.
Rating from 1 (avoid at all costs) to 10 (masterpiece): 7.5
Where to watch Whistle (2026):
