After the death of his wife, a generally angry dad and his emotionally wounded son move to a new home—just in time to be swept up in a child-killing spree. This crime procedural has a few nice elements and cautionary warnings about leaving family wounds to fester. But The Whisper Man is a gory, profane and child-abusing mess of a crime film.
Tom is trying to be a good dad to his son, Jake. I mean, his wife’s death has left a massive hole—or perhaps, wound is a better word—in both their lives.
However, Tom isn’t all that great at the job of being a good dad. He had such a contentious relationship with his own police detective father—who abandoned their family when Tom was a boy—that he isn’t always sure how best to handle his son’s newly developed fears and invisible-friend quirks. Many times, Tom simply ends up sounding angry.
Oh, but that’s not the only stone in Tom’s proverbial shoe. He’s also chosen the worst time possible to move his family back to his old hometown of Garretton.
Decades earlier, Tom’s estranged father, Peter Willis, was a detective who apprehended a serial killer called “The Whisper Man.” And yep, it was right here in the town of Garretton.
That Whisper Man is still in prison; but somehow, the child abductions have begun all over again. And the abductor is using the same whispering playbook. So when that new Whisper Man abducts Jake, Tom reluctantly asks his father to step out of retirement.
Peter laments that this horrible circumstance is the thing that brings him and his son back together again. And Tom angrily shouts, “We’re not together! This is just me asking for help. That’s all!” As Tom storms away, Peter quietly agrees to pull out the boxes of old case files and evidence to help the lead detective, Amanda Beck, with her job. Together, they’ll work on the loose ends of a case that he thought was solved long ago.
If you leave a door half open, soon you’ll hear whispers spoken.
If your window is left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass.
If you’re lonely, sad or blue, the Whisper Man will come for you.
That’s how the Whisper Man’s chilling playground poem once went. And it appears that two decades later, there are still some doors in this case that have been left open.
It’s apparent that Peter wants to find a way to reconcile with, and ask for forgiveness from, Tom. However, his efforts are routinely rebuffed until Peter makes an ultimate sacrifice near the film’s end. The two men quickly voice their love.
It’s also quite evident that Tom is trying to protect his own son and show his love.
Early on, the movie hints at the possibility that the Whisper Man is somehow able to supernaturally draw children out of their homes in the dead of night. But that’s a red herring. (Though the fact that Jake wanders out into the night is never fully explained.)
Jake claims to have an imaginary friend who sometimes guides his actions, and the movie suggests early on that this might be a ghostly apparition. But it’s later revealed to be an emotionally driven experience. Jake’s dad admits he had an imaginary friend once, too. But that friend turned out to be a real person who would visit him at night while he slept.
We don’t see any sexuality onscreen. But there are some violent sexual implications in the story mix that are listed below.
During his own personal investigations, Tom is grabbed and battered by a drug dealer. Tom also wrestles and thumps around a man he finds in his basement. He falls hard to the ground while pursuing the intruder. A police detective gets stabbed repeatedly with a knife. Then, while struggling to stay conscious, the officer pulls out the blade and slashes the leg of the attacker.
Two men struggle with the new Whisper Man. One man gets stabbed in the chest. Another is battered and bashed to the floor, an immobile, bloody mess. The third man falls through a weak and rotting spot in an attic floor and crashes down two floors.
A cornered perpetrator drives a screwdriver into his own neck and falls over sideways with his jugular spurting gore.
The new Whisper Man intimately touches his victims and clips their nails so they can’t scratch him. And, if you don’t want to read the following spoilers, you should still note that the Whisper Man sexually assaults his child victims prior to killing them.
[Spoiler Warning] The Whisper Man always killed his victims, leaving their dead bodies shirtless and their faces covered. We see one freshly killed boy, as well as the desiccated body of a previous victim (left in a field) and the skeletal remains of another who was sealed behind a metal door. Police discover the rotting body of an adult man whose head was crushed with a hammer. (The camera takes time to gaze at all of these deceased people.)
We eventually learn that the original Whisper Man was driven by a desire to sodomize his own son. (And that his own father regularly raped him when he was a child.) However, instead of attacking his own child, the Whisper Man captured and sexually molested many young male victims before killing them. Later in the film, he strips off his shirt and attacks his now-adult son—with the implication that there will be violent and deadly sexual contact that we don’t see. “Skin to skin,” the attacker says to his victim. “Like they said in the hospital. To bond you to me.”
There are 30 f-words and several s-words in the dialogue along with a few uses of “d–n.” The c-word makes a single appearance, as does a crude reference to masturbation.
God’s name and Jesus’ name are both profaned a total of six times. That total includes two blendings of God’s name with “d–n” and two times when Jesus’ name is linked to an f-word.
Both Tom and Peter are alcoholics. Peter recognizes that his family and his life were ruined by the addiction. Tom gets drunk on the night that his son is kidnapped. Tom runs into a drug dealer who’s selling fentanyl.
Part of the Whisper Man’s modus operandi is sending cassette tapes to police with recordings of him whispering to his child captives and foully manipulating their perceptions of their families and loved ones. Though the new Whisper Man isn’t as good at that manipulation, he still convinces a boy that a deceased parent didn’t love him before dying.
A teacher punishes a child who scratched a fellow student while ignoring the bully who caused the incident. In a like manner, a police officer approaches a crime scene in a flat, brusquely cold manner, putting the onus on the homeowner rather than the perpetrator.
There are several instances where children and adults make choices that play into the storyline but are patently and obviously foolish.
The Whisper Man is a linear, procedural thriller about a murderer who targets children and his copycat follower. Director James Ashcroft packs this film with all the requisite genre detritus and coats it with a creepy look and sound. But the whole shebang feels far too off-balance.
There are some nice story elements and almost developed characters here that could have been compelling if handled differently. But we see the dumb choices, stereotypes and story reveals coming from way down the road. And too many of the central characters are so brusque and cold that it’s hard to care about them.
So, in the end, we’re left with sexually abused children, jugular perforating mess and a script that’s filled with too many profane placeholders. In other words, there’s far too little hmm and far too much eww in this crime pic’s files.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
