Dir. Corin Hardy, Canada/ Ireland, 2025, 100 mins, in English

Cast: Dafne Keen, Sophie Nélisse, Sky Yang, Percy Hynes White, Michelle Fairley, Nick Frost

Review by Colin Dibben

Morbidly attractive Chrys (Keen) moves in with her cousin Rel (Yang) after the death of her dad. She starts attending Rel’s high school and buddies up with Ellie (Nélisse). Opening her school locker one day, she discovers a strange object. It turns out to be an Aztec death whistle, and what you should never, never do with an Aztec death whistle is … blow through it.

Creepy teacher Mr. Craven (Frost) confiscates the whistle and does That One Thing you Should Never Do. In, almost, the time it takes to whistle “Ehecatl” (the Aztec god of wind associated with death whistles but you knew that, of course) the high school kids are running from death. Not any old death, mind. And not the Death of the Final Destination films, either. They are running from their own, personal deaths, themselves at the moment of their previously fated deaths – in old age, from cancer, in a car accident. Personal deaths which are coursing back from the future to meet and kill them in the present.

Confusing, right? This ‘high concept’ may in fact not make total sense, but who cares! It allows Hardy to craft some beautifully nightmarish set pieces and set up at least 2 jaw-droppingly surprising, gory deaths. Don’t worry, there are several other gory death sequences. It is just that they aren’t quite as surprising as these two.

If the unique deaths reflect a concept of personal death in Owen Egerton’s script, it is the affective power of Hardy’s visual take on old house interior, lost-in-a-maze and underwater near-drowning sequences that surprises. Clichés of both CGI and real cinematic varieties get a sort of sincere, reinvigorating makeover. Because, throughout the movie, the visuals are planned and executed with an unusual level of care, which makes them often heartfelt, surreal and scary at the same time.

Think about it: American high school horrors are almost all visually bland. Perhaps it takes a Brit director or just an enthusiastic cinematographer (Björn Charpentier) and production designer (Jennifer Spence) to make the sub-genre sing again.

Performances are all very watchable. Rel’s unrequited love for a high school hottie gets almost as much screen time as Chrys’s doomy guilt feelings and her growing infatuation with Ellie.

There is also a slightly off-kilter antagonist, a drug-dealing preacher, played nastily by Percy Hynes White and a nice turn by Michelle Fairley as the ‘witchy woman who knows what is really going on’.

Whistle is out in cinemas on 13 February 2026.