After seven years in development, you’d have thought that someone could crack the code on adapting Alex North’s bestselling 2019 mystery novel The Whisper Man. But here it is, melted down into one heck of an indifferent bowlful of streaming slop.
It’s not all bad – it really isn’t – but the film, adapted by screenwriters Ben Jacoby and Chase Palmer, is rarely more than a grab-bag of clichés. Try and get through the premise without rolling your eyes: widowed author Tom (Adam Scott) moves with his young son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) into a creaky old house in an all-American suburb.
Jake (who, by the way, has an imaginary friend) disappears one night, kidnapped by the copycat child-killer who has recently surfaced in the area. Tom’s estranged dad Peter (Robert De Niro) was the cop who caught the original killer decades ago. Can Peter work with Michelle Monaghan’s local detective to track down the copycat and get Jake back safely? And, in the meantime, repair his own broken relationship with Tom?
The lengthy middle section of the film offers hints of character depth and narrative intrigue, which does keep it all quite watchable. But the screenplay suffers from an awkward structure reminiscent of some lazy AI cut-down.
The whittled-down plot is technically about the investigation, but you’ll notice there’s no real connective tissue here; it all feels and sounds like a procedural, but where are the clues, the twists, the interesting shifts in chief suspect? There’s no art to the half-explicable realisations our investigators experience across the movie’s roiling stream of vagueness.
View Green Video on the source websiteHamish Linklater and Michael Keaton provide pockets of flavour as our chief creeps, bouncing nicely off a more or less engaged De Niro and a more or less wasted Monaghan. (She has nothing to do until the final stretch, beyond looking competent.) Scott, too, is trying his darnedest with the story’s under-explored emotional baggage, though his prickliness here is far less interesting than in Hokum, another 2026 chiller in which he plays a writer battling strange goings-on. (Genre writers seem to struggle with imagining vocations beyond “writer”, “cop” and “creepy psychopath”.)
The weirdest of the movie’s crimes, though, is its occasional attempt to imply a different story entirely, touching on the red herring notion that De Niro – twist of twists – might have been the original killer’s accomplice, and is now involved in the copycat crimes. It’s hardly a spoiler to say he isn’t. But it’s interesting to watch the star putter and mumble his way through certain scenes in a way that reads, to anyone well-versed in this kind of crime schlock, as subtly, cleverly shifty; interesting, because you start to wonder if this is a misstep in scripting, direction, editing, or just the maverick misinterpretation of an 83-year-old who hasn’t prepped his scenes.
For all this, a bit of atmosphere goes a long way, and director James Ashcroft — whose previous film, 2024’s retirement-home psych-horror The Rule of Jenny Pen, was a marvellous ride — confidently crafts the pacing and mood to jolly us along to a fairly exciting violent climax.
The actors do bring the requisite presence, while the design of Tom’s empty new home is good and memorable. Peter Deming, the wonderful cinematographer behind classics Mulholland Drive and Evil Dead II as well as Twin Peaks: The Return, works a little magic here, lighting things carefully enough to lift the gloomy digital visuals somewhat above the usual Netflix “what the hell’s happening?” house style.
In the end, nothing here quite works: the crime narrative is unsatisfying, the personal arc undercooked and the light supernatural element irksome, paling next to something like The Black Phone. But the modicum of compelling material is enough to avoid total disaster. If nothing else, there’s a glorious short sequence where De Niro calmly prepares a gnocchi meal, which is worth its weight in gold.
The Whisper Man is now streaming on Netflix.
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