{"id":874421,"date":"2026-08-28T10:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T10:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/874421\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T10:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T10:08:09","slug":"the-whisper-man-review-de-niro-in-a-diverting-serial-killer-chiller","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/874421\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Whisper Man’ Review: De Niro in a Diverting Serial Killer Chiller"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cThe Whisper Man<\/a>\u201d is the first \u2014 and surely not the last \u2014 film to be adapted from the airport oeuvre of British crime novelist Steve Mosby, who since 2019 has written four books (including the source text here) under the pseudonym Alex North. If he didn\u2019t choose that nom de plume to evoke Alex Cross, the detective hero of multiple comparable James Patterson thrillers and their adaptations, then consider it a helpful coincidence. On screen, \u201cThe Whisper Man\u201d certainly assists the parallel: As you\u2019re watching, it\u2019s easy enough to mentally recast it with Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd, and to imagine exactly the kind of pretty-entertaining Nineties potboiler that would have been. This 2020s version is pretty entertaining too: Now it\u2019s Netflix<\/a> fodder rather than multiplex filler, but it passes a couple of hours just as serviceably.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere isn\u2019t even a drastic generational shift between that imaginary cast and this film\u2019s actual one. In place of Freeman we have Robert De Niro<\/a>, imparting grizzled gravitas without putting in a whole lot of noticeable effort as a former detective drafted into a grim serial-killer investigation, with marked similarities to a case he solved decades ago; in place of Judd we have Michelle Monaghan<\/a>, ever doughty and determined, as the earnest younger cop trying to follow in his footsteps. <\/p>\n

\n\tAdam Scott<\/a>, meanwhile, could be replacing pretty much anyone as the anxious dad of the unidentified psycho\u2019s latest victim; he\u2019s also a bestselling crime writer himself, and the lesson to be drawn from \u201cThe Whisper Man\u201d and \u201cHokum\u201d earlier this year is that when Adam Scott plays a successful but grief-stricken author pursuing a quiet change of scene, extreme unpleasantness will follow. He also happens to be the estranged son of De Niro\u2019s character, and the various dysfunctional daddy issues that spout from this reveal are the most distinctive feature of the script by Ben Jacoby (\u201cThe First Omen\u201d) and Chase Palmer (\u201cIt\u201d), otherwise a comfortingly conventional affair where detectives say things like, \u201cMaybe this will jog your memory,\u201d and where the usual suspects are very much the usual creepy suspects.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that\u2019s skipping ahead. The first father-son relationship at stake here is that between Tom Kennedy (Scott), the aforementioned author nursing recent widowhood, and his pre-teen son Jake (Acston Luca Porto), a sensitive loner drawn even more into his shell since losing his mother. Together, they\u2019re seeking a fresh start in small-town New Jersey \u2014 relocated from the sleepy English village of the novel \u2014 where Tom has got things off to a fairly foreboding start by a renting a creaky, leaky old Craftsman home that is vastly larger than required. The house seems to carry plenty of its own echoey baggage, so it\u2019s hardly surprising when Jake, already given to unsettling flights of imagination, begins talking to unseen figures outside the window or through the letterbox. Soon after, the boy walks out into the night, seemingly unprompted, and disappears.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut there\u2019s no \u201cWeapons\u201d-style witchcraft at work here. Instead, Jake is merely the latest target of a serial child predator whose tactics are plainly modeled on those of Frank Carter, a now-imprisoned killer who lured his young victims with sotto voce invitations that earned him the nickname The Whisper Man \u2014 which endures, decades on, in eerie local lore. Having made the connection, lead detective Amanda Beck (Monaghan) turns to Pete Willis, the retired investigator who caught Carter back in the day, and who turns out, much to his own surprise, to have a familial investment in the current case. The roots of his estrangement from Tom, which has led to the latter changing his last name, are quite vaguely outlined by the screenwriters: The \u201coriginal sin of fathers everywhere,\u201d we are told, is that they can\u2019t protect their sons. Case in point.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut \u201cThe Whisper Man\u201d has enough plot to be getting on with without getting deep into the weeds of psychological backstory. The film\u2019s procedural aspect ticks along just fine, holding the attention without subverting expectations, and carried by actors who, much like the detectives in this case, are ultra-capable professionals with no inclination to go rogue on us. <\/p>\n

\n\tIf De Niro never seems overly at pains to inhabit the character of Jersey cop with a cross to bear, his crumpled autopilot paternalism is still a warm asset to the film; Scott and Monaghan play dependably to type, while Hamish Linklater and Owen Teague bring dry flickers of intelligence to supporting roles. A streak of relish comes from Michael Keaton<\/a> as Carter, brought in by the police to shed some light on these copycat events: He isn\u2019t permitted to go full Lecter, but his cool compliance, with madness still visible behind wire-rimmed eyes, gives an otherwise by-the-book thriller a hint of perversity.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere could be more of that, considering \u201cThe Whisper Man\u201d is directed by James Ashcroft<\/a> \u2014 the New Zealander who made a far more characterful, ambiguous debut in 2021 with the Sundance shocker \u201cComing Home in the Dark\u201d \u2014 and shot by Peter Deming, the veteran DP who brought such stark-shadowed dread to David Lynch\u2019s \u201cLost Highway,\u201d \u201cMulholland Drive\u201d and \u201cTwin Peaks: The Return.\u201d Neither man does his reputation any harm here. Ashcroft keeps the pace steady and the atmosphere churning, while Deming conjures a more generic but perfectly effective air of menace in damp shades of brown and teal. \u201cThe Whisper Man\u201d is out to chill your bones for a night, not linger in them for life, and that\u2019s okay: The enjoyable turn-of-the-century diversions it recalls weren\u2019t classics either, but we remember them fondly for doing the job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Whisper Man\u201d is the first \u2014 and surely not the last \u2014 film to be adapted from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":874422,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[44475,49,48,75,303439,164925,133378,337,1316,23344,303440],"class_list":["post-874421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-adam-scott","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-james-ashcroft","tag-michael-keaton","tag-michelle-monaghan","tag-movies","tag-netflix","tag-robert-de-niro","tag-the-whisper-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}