‘Whistle’ is a High School Horror Thrill Ride That Mostly Runs Smooth [Fantastic Fest 2025]
Horror set in high schools involving teenage characters has at its root a very simple thematic emphasis: When you’re a hormonal teen, absolutely everything feels like the end of the world. Your relationships, the rumor someone spread about you, the test you blew, the scholarship you almost got, these are all things that become an almost life-or-death issue in the moment, when your whole world is a swirl of big emotions and bigger choices about your future. It’s an idea in everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Spontaneous, and it works.
It’s good news, then, that Corin Hardy‘s new film Whistle starts with an innate understanding of this concept. Death is laced throughout the film conceptually, thematically, emotionally, even in the small moments when its characters are just trying to find the best way through something like an awkward text thread. The movie hums with it, lending a weight to counterbalance the sense of pure, gory fun that buoys the rest of it. It’s not a perfect movie, but it is a movie that seems to, from jump, understand what it needs to give its audience, and that makes it a hell of a ride.
Dafne Keen stars as Chris, a teen who, after the death of her father, is forced to move halfway across the country to live with her cousin (Sky Yang). So naturally, she has to start over at a new high school, where she’s immediately set up as the weird girl with the dark past. It’s not all bad, though, because Chris quickly makes at least one friend in Ellie (Sophie Nelisse), a smart, friendly, beautiful classmate who could end up as something more.
It’s an interesting start a new school, particularly when Chris discovers something in her locker, left over from a departed student. She finds an ancient Mesoamerican whistle carved in the shape of a skull and marked with inscriptions and symbols. It might just be a cool antique, but when one of Chris’s new friends decides to try the whistle, she unknowingly summons a dark force that will kill anyone who hears the whistle’s cry.
So we’ve basically got a version of Final Destination here, in the most bare-bones sense. These kids are marked to die by a supernatural force, there’s a set of rules for how it’ll happen (which I won’t spoil here), and they seemingly can’t do anything to stop the onrushing specter. Each of the teens in Chris’ budding friend group has something of their own to deal with, with unrequited crushes to drunk driving issues to addiction, and now, on top of everything else, they have to face death catching up to them quite a bit faster than it otherwise would.
It’s a very solid concept. Sure, if you think about some of the finer points of it too hard, it might fall apart a little bit, but Whistle does not give you a moment to breathe and think about that. At 85 minutes, it is the perfect popcorn horror length, as Hardy winds up tension, plays with our jump scare expectations, and blends the drama of high school with the terror of absolutely stomach-churning deaths. Owen Egerton‘s script doesn’t necessarily offer airtight explanations for all the lore, but it doesn’t need to. These kids feel like real teenagers, their struggles are things we can relate to, and we care when a deathly specter starts chewing them up one by one.
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And boy, do these kids get chewed up. Like Final Destination and A Nightmare on Elm Street before it, Hardy and Egerton’s film takes the relatively PG-13 dilemmas of high school and marries them in spectacular fashion to graphic, creative, even jaw-dropping death scenes. The manner of death-by-whistle, you see, arrives differently for each person. Since we’re not dealing with a garden-variety slasher here, the movie has plenty of ways to twist those kills into something both stomach-churning and almost operatic. Two of my favorite kills from any horror film I’ve seen this year are in this movie, and every kill is something just over-the-top enough to be more fun than grim.
But perhaps the greatest strength of Whistle is that it’s able to deliver that fun without actually sacrificing any part of the grim. Keen is perfectly suited to Chris, a character wracked with survivor’s guilt and shame and a self-destructive streak who plainly still looks a version of death in the face every single day. As it dawns on each character what’s happening to them, the teens shift from promising young individuals to desperate children pleading with death to spare them, even as everything around them simply shrugs and says that death is inevitable.
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There’s something quite heavy there, particularly when you factor in the number of teenagers killed senselessly in this country every year. The life-and-death realities of high school for these characters might be a good place to hang a horror metaphor, but it’s also a very real thing for more than a few kids, and Whistle does not shy away from that.
This sense of sincerity and depth, coupled with great performances from Keen and Nelisse and topped off by great kills and solid thrills throughout, turns Whistle into a deeply effective piece of teen-centric horror storytelling. There are times when it gets a little in the weeds with its premise, and there are little issues with editing and pacing that sometimes stick out. But by the time this film is rounding the corner for home, that really ceases to matter. You’re just having a good time watching a scary movie, and when Whistle hits theaters this February, you won’t want to miss out on that. This should be one of the most-anticipated major horror releases of 2026, so mark your calendars.
Whistle is in theaters February 6, 2026.
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Whistle
Summary
Featuring incredible kill sequences and strong performances, Corin Hardy’s ‘Whistle’ is a deeply effective piece of teen-centric horror storytelling.
Categorized: Reviews
