As I look at the calendar near my desk, I can see that we are nearly a week into February of 2026. Spiritually, however, it does not seem controversial to say we’re still in January; time has been moving slower than usual these past 12 months, and one might be forgiven for mentally lagging a few weeks behind. My point here is that, while we may have reached chronological February, the annual ritual of the January Horror Dump— the period in which studios, freed from the expectation of winning awards, let loose with their least-reputable genre offerings— is still going strong. Whistle hits theaters this Friday, but it’s a January horror movie if there ever was one.

Dafne Keen (Wolverine’s young sidekick from Logan) plays Chrysanthemum, a sullen, damaged outcast teen in the Lydia Deetz vein (though Robin Tunney in The Craft may be closer to the mark). Like countless sullen horror-movie teens before her, Chrys is the new kid at Pellington High, her only point of contact her likably dorky stoner cousin Rel (Sky Yang). Pellington suffered from bad vibes even before Chrys showed up; the previous year, the star basketball player, whose locker Chrys has inherited, died under mysterious circumstances (he burned to death… in the shower). On her first day, Chrys discovers a strange, skull-shaped object in her locker, which an expository google search reveals to be an ancient Aztec “death whistle.” Inevitably, the whistle finds its way to a party with Chrys and her newfound friends; inevitably, it gets blown; and, inevitably, the teens of Pellington High begin to die in increasingly bizarre fashion.

With its slick sheen and pretty young cast, Whistle calls to mind the teen-oriented horror films which dominated the market in the years following Scream. Specifically, the main point of reference here seems to be the Final Destination series, which rejected the de rigueur masked slasher for a more nebulous “grim reaper” death-curse. The twist this time around is that the sound of the whistle hastens whichever death you’re fated for, no matter how unlikely it may seem at this stage of your life. A relatively healthy smoker, for example, abruptly develops several decades worth of tumors, while a young character destined to die of old age shrivels and dies in a matter of seconds. As Michelle Fairley, as a spooky-ooky antique collector (and clear stand-in for Final Destination’s Tony Todd) says, “Dying is not a choice— but living, that’s up to you.”

This is a pretty nifty premise for a horror movie. Unfortunately, the deaths here lack the ghoulish invention of the Destination films (or, for that matter, the sickoid humor of last year’s Destination-alike The Monkey). With the exception of a squirrely history teacher played by Nick Frost, there’s little of the delicious irony needed for this sort of material; the characters simply die in perfunctorily gory set pieces (which, rendered in chintzy CGI, don’t even pack as much gross-out oomph as they ought to). Director Corin Hardy directed the wildly successful Conjuring spinoff The Nun, but his workmanlike approach to genre is ill-suited to this sort of EC Comics material. In the impish hands of, say, Trick ‘R Treat’s Michael Dougherty (or, for that matter, the newly revitalized Sam Raimi), Whistle might have been a nasty delight.

So Whistle is not very good— but I have to admit that it’s the sort of not-very-good I do have a fondness for. The Halloween fair setting is appealingly autumnal, Hardy leaning hard into a warm, orange-and-black palette (had this movie come out in October I probably would have been a few degrees more forgiving). The queer flirtation between Chrys and nice-girl Ellie— something which absolutely could not have existed in the Clinton/Bush-era slashers from which Whistle is descended— is genuinely sweet, and provides a refreshing dose of humanity. Also notably different from the irony-laden cynicism of the I Know What You Did Last Summer era is the film’s earnestness. This film actually cares about its rock-headed teens, and by the end, you might as well.

Ultimately, I can’t quite recommend Whistle. It’s just too unformed, its best ideas left frustratingly unrealized and underdeveloped (another of its more compelling elements, a skeezy youth pastor/drug dealer played by Percy Hynes White, feels like he sauntered in from an entirely different movie). But I also can’t quite hate it. This is your basic meat-and-potatoes teenage death curse film; there’s very little about it to separate it from the pack, but if that pack is one that appeals to you (as it does to me), you’ll likely find some amusement here. Whistle is destined to become menu-filler on the streaming service of your choice, likely with a dead-average star rating. It’s decent enough fun, but personally, I’m ready for January to end.

Whistle
2025
dir. Corin Hardy
97 min.

Screening midnights Fridays & Saturdays beginning 2/6 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
Screenwriter Owen Egerton in person for the 2/7 show
Also screening @ Apple Cinemas Cambridge & AMC Boston Common