The Whisper Man, new on Netflix, is one of those psychological thrillers that stacks up a pile of unsettling material—a serial killer, child endangerment, a child grieving his recently deceased mother, nursery rhymes, jump scares, and generalized trauma—and thinks they’ll somehow add up to an entertaining movie.
It’s little more than an overlong Criminal Minds episode, one that steals just about all of its plot ideas from either The Silence of the Lambs or Zodiac. The one creative idea is that there’s not one but two estranged father-son pairs, one on each side of the law, but that’s not enough to hang a whole movie on. Adapted from a novel by Alex North, the film was directed by James Ashcroft, who a couple of years ago directed a slightly better thriller called The Rule of Jenny Pen, which, unlike The Whisper Man, had some surprises.
Adam Scott plays Tom Kennedy, a novelist who, after his wife’s death, brings his young son (Acston Luca Porto) back to the wife’s hometown and childhood home (the film is set in and was filmed in New Jersey, but offers no distinctive sense of place). There’s a serial killer of children on the loose, who’s being investigated by a hard-nosed cop (Michelle Monaghan). For help, she goes to a retired police detective (Robert De Niro), who years earlier had put away a serial killer (Michael Keaton). De Niro, happens to be Tom’s long-estranged father, who’d never met either his grandson or his late mother. Scott’s son, of course, ends up in danger, and it’s up to his dad and grandpa to set aside their differences and save the day.
The film borrows from Silence of the Lambs and Manhunter the conceit of using one imprisoned serial killer to catch another, and from Zodiac the idea that there are several suspects, each played by an actor dialing up the creep factor to about 11. And also, after this spring’s Hokum, this is the second film this year in which Adam Scott plays a novelist dealing with past trauma who stumbles into murder.
Scott, with the success of Severance, is getting a lot of movie roles, although I preferred the version of him in Hokum, which let him be a prick, over the bundle of nerves he plays here. Neither De Niro nor Monaghan is given much to do, but worse than that, the Hannibal Lecter bit doesn’t work, because Keaton’s also barely given a character to play. Hamish Linklater is much more unsettling as one of the suspects. And as usual, there’s never a moment of doubt about the kidnapped kid’s fate.